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I'm very happy to be here. Very pleased to be here. And I think this is a very important set of issues.

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The papers, which have been presented thus far at this conference have been more from, as I said, a social science background.

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So this is going to be a little bit different. My training is in Islamic studies, and I'm focusing on a contemporary jurist named Use Sonore.

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He's a very eminent jurist of Iranian Iranian jurists, and he is a Shiite, a 12 or Shiite.

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And his rulings are quite unusual and they directly impinge on the theme of this conference, which is legal reform affecting women.

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He, if I'm not mistaken, and I mean this information on his is from his website.

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He has a website like many of the high ranking, all of the of the Shia school.

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LUHNOW And so apparently he was he's probably about 75 years old.

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And if you're more interested in his biography, you can go and read it there.

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It's in many languages. It's up in English and will do in Persian and Arabic.

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But what's most relevant is, well, his age is relevant to to to be influential in Shiite law.

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You know, you can't really be under 40.

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You can't be. So you have to be blessed with longevity as well if you want to achieve anything with a good memory and a good memory.

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So but what's also important is that he studied with many of the eminent ulema of his time, such as H Liberal Jyoti,

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but most importantly, perhaps Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the so-called Islamic Republic of Iran.

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And he's even had a documentary film done about him by the Doha based Al Jazeera called Online Ayatollah.

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And there was an article there was actually a series done on Iran in the London based Arabic newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat.

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And they did a whole thing on him in which they dubbed him Mufti and this or the jurist consult of the women.

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So he's distinguished himself by a number of of of peculiar rulings, peculiar against the backdrop of the broader sort of tradition of Islamic law.

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And among his noteworthy legal opinions that directly impinge on women are that

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a woman may become a multi athlete or what is called a model of imitation.

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In in Shiite law, there is maybe 200 such individual.

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Well, there's maybe 200 such individuals in the whole world. It can be a large number.

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I mean, I don't have the statistics. I mean, if I want to talk about math in the order of magnitude, it's going to be hundreds.

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It's not very hundreds of thousands of people who have reached to a level of independent judgement or HDI.

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And then so let's say we have a few hundred of these people and it's going to be a very small number who actually want to take

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the trouble of issuing rulings in substantial enough and in the codified forms of the people can read them and follow him.

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So it's similar.

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It's something like in Sunni Islam where you are either a Hanafi process or you automatically or humbly, but those guys are dead, long, long dead.

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And for the most part, the vast majority of Shiite scholars have the opinion you must follow a living guide,

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a model of imitation, hence the term majority. So he has ruled that a woman can become such a figure.

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He also says a woman may hold government office. Thank you. A woman may serve as a judge.

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A woman and a man are equal in cosmos, and a woman and a man are also equal, as are a muslim and non-Muslim in Kansas as well.

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But also India or the blood which a woman inherits all of her husband's wealth.

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If there are no other heirs, a woman is not forbidden to leave her house, even if she does not take her husband's permission.

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A woman need not take her husband's permission if she wishes to make a vow or another that concerns her person or her personal wealth,

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should a woman forego her dowry seeking divorce than the husband was granted to her?

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A woman has the right of guardianship.

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Well, I this came up earlier as well as custody over her children should her husband die rather than her father in law.

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There is a bunch of these rulings. We certainly can't look at all of them.

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We will look at some of them and probably only one or two.

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Now, that's a small number, but it will be we look at them in sufficient detail, hopefully, so that one may get an idea.

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Very good idea of his methodology and mindset.

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Know I was. Before I really begin, I simply state my conclusion about my conclusions about it's a lesson I at the outset and is very simply stated.

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I think that in the jurisprudence of Ayatollah's lesson, we have a kind of reassertion or reaffirmation, if you like,

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of the notion of of personhood or, if you like, the more modern term or notion of human being, rather than the categories of mere woman and mere men.

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Now, I'll try to make this more clear in the examples which I give,

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but first we must have aa5 or six minute introduction to also understand where she is, so that there really needs to be an AUP book like that.

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So if you know anyone there, I would be happy to write it, you know,

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have a very brief introduction, a very short introduction of this over £8 or something.

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Right. Islamic jurisprudence is a very peculiar sort of jurisprudence.

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It's somewhat more similar, I suppose, to to Orthodox Jewish Law Halacha.

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And there was much discussion and question and answer about codification at this conference there.

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Really, even in Shiite Islam, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no final authority in Islam.

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There's no pope. There's no patriot, orthodox patriarch or whatever.

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There's nothing like that.

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There was some attempt by the British to manipulate the Muslims in Islamic history by trying to put forward various candidates as caliph.

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And there has been also some attempt to sort of portray the rector of the Azhar University as somehow speaking for Sunni Islam.

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But these are all rather nonsensical categories with very various political agendas behind them.

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There is no sort of final ecclesiastical authority.

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And so what you do have is you have learned individuals, the scholars who presumably have attained to a level of erudition whereby excuse me,

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they are able to derive the law, so to speak, directly from the sources.

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This level of erudition is called jihad. What are the sources of Islamic law, therefore, and depends on which school we're talking about.

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So we're talking about Sunnis and Shiites. In Sunni Islam, it's very well known.

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It's and Khattab was well known as case, which basically means, you know, the Koran, the text of the Koran.

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Then they use the term Suna. Suna is the normative practice of the Prophet Muhammad.

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Some of my ideas in them. What is the son?

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What was his normative practice? We don't know. We can't go and ask him.

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So what we do have is something else called the Hadiths, which are accounts of his statements or his actions or his tacit approvals.

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And these accounts were originally oral, and they were compiled in this old historical debate about how and when this all took place.

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And then you have each matter or the juridical consensus, the consensus of the jurists, and then you have a piece which is juridical analogy.

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You know, this is for Sunni Islam. All of the four well-known Sunni schools of law, the Hanafi, Maliki Qawwali, will adhere to this.

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The one Sunni school of law is not well known much anymore is the law school which rejects peace,

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which rejects any sort of notion of juridical analogy. In this they are have they share this opinion with the 12 Shiites.

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So the 12 are Shiites also reject peers and they have a different quadri partite division, which looks superficially the same, but it's not.

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Mm hmm. I should also add that this, quote, apartheid division, when I when I speak of the 12, are Shiites, I mean, the Sunni school.

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My question earlier of the year, the earlier speaker was addressing that.

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There's a division also among the 12 Shiites between the Israelis and the US bodies.

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And yet what is pretty much finished.

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Very, very small number of adherents except for in Bahrain, the notable exception, they still sort of survive there.

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So for the 12 year old Sunnis, you have again the Koran.

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Then you have the son. But here the son is not just the normative practice of the Prophet Muhammad, but it also includes the so-called in syllables,

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what are termed the insoluble elements, all moving or are not so mean, and they're actually 14 persons.

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So there's the Prophet Muhammad, his daughter, Fatima. Zahra and the 12 imams.

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And who are they? Well, that's Ali Hassan Hussein and so forth.

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I could recite all the names for you, but we don't need to do that.

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So what's important to realise is that the imams are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad

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through the Union of Ali and Fatima Saddam as the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

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Ali is his cousin and his son in law.

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And so then the 12 imams are the Ali is the first imam, and then the line of the imams goes through his eldest son, Hassan.

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Then it goes to his younger son Hussein. And then the line of imams perpetuates from Hussein.

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So the Sunni that for the 12 Shiites includes the statements, actions and tacit approvals of all of these individuals.

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And so the body of son is much larger for the Shiites.

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And so the the hadiths are really, really huge.

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The corpus of Hadith is vast. Showing this.

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To give you an idea, one of the largest compendiums of Shiite Hadith literature is called the heart of Anwar.

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And in the most widespread, widely used edition today, it is 110 volumes.

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Now each volume is about that thick. You know, it's maybe maybe, you know, it would be like a 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 centimetres thick.

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But then you have 110 of them, and I have it. It takes a lot of space.

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That's a lot of hadiths.

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For this reason, the Shiite jurist is actually somewhat more limited in terms of their room for manoeuvre than the Sunni jurists,

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because they just have a lot more sources of law. And in many cases, in many, many, many instances, things are spelled out in great detail.

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Nowhere in Sunni Islam will you find a complete description of how the five prayers are supposed to be performed.

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You kind of have to dig around. You won't find it in a single Hadith. You have to piece it together.

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In 1238 Hadith, you have the full description.

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So so the Shiite jurists have somewhat less room for manoeuvre and the Sunni jurist had less text, which is why they had to resort to this.

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So the third principle then for the 12 Shiites is also juridical consensus.

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But here it's not the same. It looks the same. In other words, something like the Western notion of legal precedent.

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No, it's not like that at all.

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You have to realise that for the 12 Shiites, the Prophet Muhammad, like all the prophets and the imams, are all completely, totally infallible.

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They don't make any mistakes.

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So it is the job of the jurist to try to discover what the law is, preferably by finding explicit statements in the Koran or the Hadith.

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And then if not, then he has to be careful. He doesn't have a little room for manoeuvre.

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They don't allow chaos. So what do you do? How do you basically justify the consensus of a bunch of jurists?

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You have to understand that the 12th imam is considered to be still alive by the 12 Shiites, so it would make him about 1200 years old.

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But he is an occultation. And so the principle of each matter or consensus is considered a means for discovering the opinion of the 12th man.

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Because if you're referring to a previous generation of jurists, then you must conclude that somehow the opinion of the 12th man is there as well.

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And so each man is seen as a means of discovering the view of the 12th, and then you have the fourth principle,

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which is IQ or the the judgements of pure and practical reason to use modern philosophical terminology.

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And this is very important for sign him because he does this a lot. So that's a Shiite as well there.

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In addition, which was developed much later in the 19th century, if I'm not mistaken,

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my share from Humble and Sadi, another set of principles called Ahmadiyya, which we cannot go into.

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But just for the sake of completeness, we we mentioned them.

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If anyone is interested in all of these things in more detail, you should read the papers and of Hussein majority.

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That's pretty much all that's out there. And he has a book called Xi Law, a bio bibliographical study.

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Is it compressed? 1986, at any rate.

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So what does this mean for use of Sony? Well, let's look at some examples.

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How am I doing on time? So you have another service.

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Oh, my God. All right. Yeah.

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If we look at the his ruling on blood, which where he says basically the the blood way to the man and woman is equal.

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So this is in the case of, for example, an accidental death.

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You know, you're out hunting, you shoot some arrows and you end up killing someone unintentionally.

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For example, what do you do? Well, there's really no serious debate on whether there is a blood, whether or not there is.

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But suddenly he says that the blood work is equal.

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Now, why does he say this? Which, by the way, is 100 camels or its equivalent?

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100 camels or 200 cows or a thousand gold dinars?

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It's 10,000 silver dirhams.

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So Sani rules that there is no disparity at all in the amount of the blood between a man or woman and indeed between a muslim or a non-Muslim.

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He argues that there's only a single verse in the Koran that even mentions death, which is the fourth Sura.

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The Koran written is the one name for women and the verses 9 to 2, if you want to go on, it's kind of long.

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But what it does, it merely establishes the principle that DIA is due in cases where one is killed, where someone is killed by mistake.

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It does not specify the amount of the dead, whether in camels or what have you in any way.

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What to say of establishing differing amounts for men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim.

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Moreover, the Koran explicitly establishes the sanctity of all human life.

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There's a famous verse which alludes to the original, if you like, Primordial Murder of Cain by Abel.

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And it states that on account of this heinous deed, it was decreed to the children of Israel.

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Then it was for you that any who take a life.

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And the word that's used in Arabic is nuts. So any who takes a life, it is as though he killed all humankind and national jihad.

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While if anyone saved a life, it is as though he saved all humankind.

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Moreover, the Koran also states. Also, interestingly enough, included in this are the forces of the Koran.

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First, verse eight.

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Yohannes Tucker Bookman, Lydia Coleman of Xinhua, had written in has ojigho of a seminal marriage identity on when he said,

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Oh humankind, be mindful of your Lord who created you from a single soul.

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Mean Xinhua. Again, the word is naps in Arabic and from it created its mate.

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The term is ZOG in Arabic. And from then to end, this is pixel has spread abroad.

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A multitude of men and women. It's there that you get the gender differentiation, the vaginal and catheter monies.

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Despite these clear Koranic passages of the equal sanctity of all human life, male and female believer in infidel,

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she jurisprudence quantifies the desire of a woman to be half that of a man.

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How did this happen? Well, the support for this view is established not on the basis of the Koran.

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Remember, there's only one verse in the Koran that explicitly mentions the blood to it,

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and it's really just establishing the principle of blood, but not the amounts.

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So where does it come from? Remember, she argues Prudence. Well, now you've got to go to the Hadith.

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So there's a bunch of hadiths on this. If you're wondering, there are exactly 14.

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And those 14 hadiths are found in the most important legal compendium of Hadiths by

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compiled by a cultural committee such that the period is called Without Side of Shia.

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As you need the references, I can get them for you. But suffice it to say that there are 14 hadiths and out of those son, he argues.

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And I forgot to mention my source son. And he has published a series called Sunni Citizenship Advisory.

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And it's my guess is he probably wrote it originally in Persian and it's downloaded everything from the website.

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But on the website, he's only got those books up in Arabic. Alternatively, he could have written them in Arabic.

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I really don't know for sure. Here, what they do matter if he did.

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Because sometimes you can't tell. Because there is a kind of Shiite seminary in Arabic which isn't like modern.

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I actually think it's better than modern Arabic. But then you have to know the terms and so forth in the end.

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So you can't always tell, at any rate, insensitive political mind so that he has a monograph,

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about 100 pages called Mosul what being a radical or what a muslim.

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One Catholic said the equality of men and women and Muslims and non-Muslims in blood.

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So this is a whole series. And it's interesting because it's the term that's used is the series on CIP.

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The word is spoken in Arabic, which is different from the term Sharia separately indicates understanding.

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And so there is an element of interpretation and sanity in this in this monograph and in others.

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And there's there's about ten of them in this series, at least that I found on the Web.

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All ten of them are not there. There's some discrepancy in the numbering, but at any rate, you can look in the website.

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And so it's interesting that he uses this in these monographs.

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He talks about how there is law, there is Sharia, and then there's the interpretation of jurists.

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So with reference to this question, he says that these hadiths, out of these 14 ladies,

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there's actually only two which can be construed as is putting forward a kind of disparity in the amounts,

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and he rejects those on linguistic and other grounds.

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So in one of them, the term allegedly is used allegedly.

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And actually, the narrator says that he asked one of the imams about the idea of a radical,

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and then the imam answered and suddenly he says, well, the terminology will also in Arabic, you can use any gender neutral sense.

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And so he clearly favours it going that way.

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But he also says that, well, we don't you know, this is the phrasing of the person who asked the question.

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Had he phrased it differently, maybe the imam would have given a different answer.

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And other hadiths he rejects on what not.

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What one always does in these debates is if you're not familiar with this, hadiths are evaluated according.

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In terms of authenticity, usually by the narrators. And so [INAUDIBLE] find something wrong with one of the narrators, say, well,

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this narrator or narrator is weak or this narrator is not reliable, or this person is unknown.

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These are the sorts of things that are done. And so he basically gets rid of those.

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But for sanity, the ultimate principles are these principles which are found in the Koran, in his sort of understanding of a suicidal sufferer,

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if you like, his methodology, he favours or it gives pride of place or priority, shall we say,

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to the Koranic values of justice and equality, which are clearly stated in verses which which some of which we cite,

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in which he also cites, as well as in many hadiths of the imams, which are of undisputed, impeccable, if you like, the authenticity.

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So we don't it would have been nice if we had time to go through all of those hadiths, but we don't.

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Hmm. Yeah. There is another example which we won't be able to go into,

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but this has we mentioned that if you have the situation in inheritance where the sole heir is the wife, then he.

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Rules that she should get the entirety of the state of the deceased husband as opposed to one quarter.

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And again, he goes through the same sort of method,

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same same sort of arguments that to go otherwise is against the notion of justice and against the notion of equality and so forth,

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which is established in the mind. He's not appealing to the U.N. Charter on Human Rights.

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He's very much within the Shiite tradition and trying to work within the tradition of soul itself.

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He also, since he is a Shiite and this comes out in a book of sort of essays of his, it's not very legal.

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So the book is called Love Bible. What's it called?

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Well, some essays which he wrote.

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And he talks about the importance for Shiite Muslims of Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad,

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and how she is sort of the ideal sort of model for Islamic women and womanhood and so forth.

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This may be one reason he has sort of written this sort of an attitude or a more kind of respectful.

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I don't know if that's the right turn of phrase with respect to the questions of that relate to women.

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But there is another dimension. He he's very clearly like, as we find in the Shiite school.

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But he argues more, I think much more vigorously for the notion that there has to be a rationale behind all divinely instituted laws.

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What is it what's called in in in Shiite the Sunnis faith or in these discussions of of holding a husband.

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Welcome, Liane. That was to say the notion of a kind of literal translation of rational,

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good or evil and to put it in a more idiomatic English, not translating, but interpreting.

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In other words, the ethical evaluation of Acts must have a basis in reason, and divine legislation is not whimsical as in physics.

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So also in the law you need to borrow a phrase from Einstein.

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God does not play dice with the universe.

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So if God had said in the Koran that we should not consume intoxicating alcoholic drinks, then there is a reason for this.

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There's a rationale behind it, whether we know it or not.

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The Sunni Oshodi School took the opinion that, well, no, there isn't we there is no rationale behind these things.

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Things are good or bad simply because God said so.

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And if he said, well, don't drink lemon juice, then we wouldn't be drinking lemon juice today simply because he said it.

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So, son, he also appeals, therefore, to reason in his arguments.

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All right. Why how and why the how and why of Sunny's rulings?

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I mean, how did we how did we get to this situation?

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I mean, if things are so simple and clear in the Koran, as he would argue, how did we get this one?

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This is my opinion. Sunny isn't saying anything about this. I think that something funny, something odd happened in Islamic history.

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It's hard to say exactly when, but it has been called the the egalitarian turn or the legality and ascendancy

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by someone in Christiane JAMA in a book he wrote called The Act of Being,

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which is a book on Islamic philosophy on melisandre. But it's this point in Islamic history where I or knowledge and the Lama,

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therefore the men of knowledge or the women of knowledge, as well as the people of knowledge.

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The scholars, if you like,

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become identified completely with legal knowledge and legal scholarship as opposed to other ways of knowing other scholar discipline,

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such as philosophy since Caesar. And I think that had a very profound and lasting and in some ways detrimental effect

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on Islamic intellectual history and the effects of which we live with to this day.

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Now, in terms of implications, I mean, you know, isn't going to be influential in terms of legal reform in the MENA region.

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I doubt it. One, because he's a Shiite jurist, the Shiites are very much marginalised in Muslim world anyway.

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And the other thing is that a lot of the other Shiite jurists are not really taking him seriously.

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And if you talk to some Shiite dilemma, they sort of smile, Sunny, you know, as though he's some kind of a laughing stock or something,

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but they can't really say what say that because he studied with them and people.

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He was appointed to the Council of Guardians. Was it Council of Experts after the revolution even served as a prosecutor?

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You know, he's not just some guy walking around that you can dismiss, but there is a kind of authority of antiquity.

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You know, the older an opinion is, the harder it is usually to to question it and challenge it.

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And if Islamic intellectual history or legal history tells us anything, these kind of views will only be successful in the long term.

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If if he is able to educate enough students who are then in turn able to influence more and survive.

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And this is how things happen. But whether it will happen or is very hard to say, I mean, you cannot really predict these kind of sociological forces.

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It's easier to predict an earthquake and tsunami. So we'll have to wait, but we'll probably all be long gone.