I was driving home from a thoroughly enjoyable social occasion (a baby shower for two couples) and the batteries had given out on the iPod radio thingemejig so I had Light FM on the radio as is my wont. I chanced upon a discussion of a book called Not Under Bondage: Biblical Divorce for Abuse, Adultery and Desertion. Not having been raised a Christian, my limited knowledge about divorce in the Christian church is as follows: Catholics aren’t allowed to get divorced, the rest can. Apparently, however, there is still some discussion in Christian churches about the status of divorcees, particularly those who are ministers, preachers etc.

Now, of course Jesus, peace be upon him, grew up in the context of Jewish religious law and so his statements about divorce would naturally have to be understood in the context of a discussion with Jewish scholars of religious law. But because Paul made some statements about how it was all legalistic and Christians don’t have to worry about any of that stuff, religious law has tended to have a pretty low status in Christian thinking. It’s one of the common criticisms you hear some evangelical Christians make about Jews and Muslims.

Yet Jesus, peace be upon him, taught his followers to respect and follow religious law and in particular the legislation he brought:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Bible, Matthew 5:17-20)

Because later Christians rejected religious law (but became known for their commitment to ethics and morality) there are a few issues the church does stumble over. Divorce is one of them. Consequently, listening to Christians discussing their fiqh of divorce, I realised how immature (by comparison with Jews and Muslims) their fiqh is. It is a little bit like a muscle that hasn’t been exercised for a long time, in comparison to those of athletes who are constantly training.

I haven’t read the above mentioned book, but from the radio discussion I gathered her interpretation of the fiqh of Christian divorce is that Christians married to non-Christians can be divorced if the non-Christian is antagonistic to the Christian faith however Christians married to other Christians who are abusive, may divorce but may not remarry. The law that stuck out at me though, was a reference to how Christian leaders may only be the “husband of one wife”. When I heard that, my first thought was ‘oh, that’s a limitation on polygyny’, however the author made no reference to that possibility, but rather that it was symbolic of a Christian leader keeping fidelity to his wife and keeping a high morality.

At anyrate, I just found it really interesting to listen to a fiqh discussion on Christian radio, but I don’t envy them their difficulty in trying to interpret Christian shari`a without the tools that Jewish and Muslim scholars have long developed in approaching understanding sacred law.

I’ll have a decaf caramel latte and an exorcism to go thanks.

The big CC is planning to automatically excommunicate women and their ordaining bishops who become priests.

The Church says it cannot change the rules banning women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles. Catholic law states that only a baptised male can be made a priest. (Ref)

Hmmm, surely by that logic only ethnic Jews would be able to be Catholic priests?

Ades is a MyBlogLog surfer who pointed me Back to Islam. It’s a blog for people who have left Islam but then re-embraced the faith. As well as personal stories, it has a misconceptions section, and an Islamic downloads section (including a handy Zakat calculator in spreadsheet).

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A common problem that has arisen since Islam hit the world spotlight, is that religious terms that have complex and deep (and often quite beautiful) meanings, are given simplistic, invariably negative-in-connotation translations, which are then used to build a strawman argument about Islam.

The words jihad, shari`a, madrassa, taqiyya, fatwa, jizya, dhimmi, have all fallen victim to this problem, and a search on any of them on the web will usually throw up dozens of articles from Islamophobic sites and blogs (you know which ones I mean, and I’m not going to plug them here).

Another common term that is misused, unfortunately by Muslims too, is the word kafir.  It is often mistranslated as “unbeliever”, “disbeliever” or worse “infidel”, and is used commonly and erroneously to refer to any non-Muslim.

So, what is a kafir? The noun comes from an Arabic root kafara, which means ‘to cover’.  So, a kafir is someone who covers truth.  To hide or cover the truth, one first has to recognise it, so the term precludes ordinary non-Muslims who do not know or truly understand Islam (and that includes people whose only exposure is the Izlam on FauxNews).  Satan, for example, is a kafir: it believes in God but constantly rejects Him.

A kafir, then, is a truth-concealer. But it means more than this, because the overtones of the word imply that if someone knows but covers truth, this makes him or her guilty of obscene ungratefulness to God. The very first thing that we all owe to God is gratefulness for our being, and to pay this debt of gratitude with faithful belief in Him.  A kafir, therefore, is an ungrateful truth-concealer.

For those interested, a very good beginner’s summary of the concept of kufr is provided in Sachiko Murata and William Chittick’s The Vision of Islam.

Now, recognising the gravity of such a label, our beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) forbid Muslims from carelessly tossing the term around, and warned that any soul foolhardy enough to unjustly call another person a kafir (the act of which is called takfir - to pronounce someone a kafir) then he himself would become the kafir.

Narrated Abu Hurayra: God’s Apostle said, “If a man says to his brother, ‘O kafir!’ Then surely one of them is such.

Now clearly, such a beast as a kafir exists, the Qur’an describes the qualities of a kafir so that we may be warned not to become one. But the pious Muslim errs on the side of caution in leaving such a derogatory judgment to God Himself.

Common use of takfir, is also one of the defining characteristics of heterodoxy, such as was practiced by the early breakaway sect the Kharajites. It is the fear of divine censure that has traditionally prevented Muslims from developing tools of excommunication such as is wielded in the Catholic tradition, and for this reason that Muslims have been criticized for not excommunicating the likes of Usama bin Laden.  For in Islam–who has such authority?  Only God.