#A WordPress Site » Feed A WordPress Site » Comments Feed A WordPress Site » Why American Muslims Should Support Same Sex Marriage Comments Feed [twitter1.png] * Home * My Blog (Islamic Law In Our Times) * Curriculum Vitae * Noteworthy Academic Publications * Recent Presentations * Location * Contact Me * Purchase My Books! * Information for Prospective JSD Applicants Why American Muslims Should Support Same Sex Marriage Posted on January 10, 2012 by muslimlawprof Before you shoot me, fellow American Muslims, let’s make one thing clear. No matter how the same sex debate turns out, nobody is going to be requiring you to deem same sex marriages as Islamically legitimate. Within the broad spectrum of religious discourse, some may urge you to do that (Irshad Manji), some may view such a notion as ridiculous, abhorrent or both (the vast majority of traditionalist clerics, as any liberal Muslim would concede), but I will not address any of that here. I am not a cleric, I make no religious argument. Instead, I maintain that you can be a traditionalist Muslim and support same sex marriage as being legal in America, even if Islamically unacceptable. In fact, I think you should do it. How is it possible, if one is a traditionalist unwilling to recognize a homosexual relationship as licit or legitimate? Well, traditionalists do something like this already. They do a great deal of it, specifically in the area of marriage. The state explicitly recognizes particular forms of marital union that the shari’a, as understood traditionally, unequivocally condemns. Traditionalist approaches to Islam have always deemed the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man to be invalid. The matter is laid out no less clearly in the manuals of the classical jurists than the condemnation of homosexuality is. The marriage of the Muslim woman to the non-Muslim man is not a marriage and as such, the sex between them is illicit, a form of zina, and criminal, at least as criminal as homosexual acts would be in the classical manuals. Yet it would be something akin to insanity to suggest that the United States criminalize the marriage of Muslim women to non Muslim men. I know the “shari’a creep” elements worry about this, but no American Muslim I know has ever gone about suggesting they want the state to render such marriages illegal irrespective of the wishes of that Muslim woman. Even if someone does suggest it (probably an idiot, we have them too), no state code that did such a thing would be close to constitutional, it violates equal protection of genders, free exercise, establishment, equal protection of individuals by religion, due process and right to marry–it’s hard in fact to think of something else that violates this many rights at once. Again, we know this, we’ve internalized this, we’re happy in the United States even if its rules might afford state recognition of marriages the religion doesn’t. (Just so some Islamophobe does not get it in his head to copy the paragraph above to demonstrate the absolute incompatibility of Islam with American values, let me just point out the same conflict exists as between canon law and the state recognition of marriages of previously divorced couples. To the Catholic church, those are not marriages. Under American law, they are. No Catholic I know wants the law to strip recognition of these marriages, just like no Muslim does respecting interfaith marriages of Muslim women. And even if some Catholic did, it would violate a lot of constitutional provisions, as it would in the Muslim case vis a vis the marriages discussed above. And so forth. Which perhaps is why several decades ago it was the Catholics and not us who were supposedly “creeping” up on the US and threatening a takeover according to the xenophobes of their day. We’ll make it in eventually, and you’ll know it when a few decades from now when some American Muslim xenophobe starts complaining about some other religion or ethnic group creeping into America and threatening it. It’ll come, this I believe.) Why do we accept such rules despite their condemnation? What justifies it, assuming that is that one finds the traditional approaches to shari’a the more valid? Simply stated, borrowing from the work of others (Andrew March, Mohammad Fadel, etc.), though extending it further to be clear, it is the aman, a form of a social contract. We are free here to practice our religion, to proclaim it, to spread it even if we want to, and in return the deal is the adherence to and upholding of enshrined constitutional principles respecting human liberty and equality, across all religions. So a woman may convert to Islam and marry a Muslim man, or she may convert from Islam and marry a non-Muslim man. For many of us, me included, these principles of individual liberty and religious equality, from free speech to free exercise to equal protection, too broad a subject to be broached here in detail, have been deeply internalized and we believe in them as core constitutive civic values, even seeking to export them. For others, they might be ethical obligation by way of accommodation, followed just like a believer follows the rules of a contract, an obligation to pay their iphone bill every month. You do it as an ethical matter, not because you like it, not because you’ll be sued if you don’t (then it would not be an ethical obligation, purely a legal one), but because you like the service, you agreed to this and you are a Muslim, and the Qur’an requires the believers to uphold their contracts. But either way, you live up to the deal as ethical obligation, as a deal. So as Muslims what should we be afraid of? Not that the state is going to allow marriages that are unIslamic, we’ve signed on to that and it is an acceptable piece of the aman we’ve made. No, it’s the breaking of the aman we should fear, effectively a ripping up of the social contract. How does that happen? If the rules change and we are no longer free to practice our religion. Now one group of people would argue that happens with the rise of same sex marriage. Because once one allows same sex marriage, then it spreads, and then every religious institution has to recognize it, and if they don’t, then I don’t know, maybe the police come? They stand in the back with their radio speakers and their guns and drag the Imam off in handcuffs for refusing to marry a gay couple under the Qur’an and the tradition of the Apostle? Or something? As you can tell, I cannot imagine such a thing happening. But if it did, it would be a ripping up of the social contract, the one ensured by the constitution, and make a mockery of free exercise of religion. Few things are more violative of religious freedom to my mind than to compel a religious institution to perform a wedding it did not believe was valid under its religious tradition. Again, I don’t worry about this. If the US doesn’t do it for divorced Catholics now, it isn’t going to do it for same sex marriages. So what am I afraid of, how do I see the contract ripping up? By the folks currently threatening to rip it up, the ones who talk of shari’a as if it was a contagion, by the ones who want to deny our right to build our own houses of worship, by the ones threatening to pass laws that say that two people who meet to practice shari’a (that’s prayer; prayer rules are part of shari’a) are engaged in an act of terrorism, by presidential contenders who won’t hire us (Herman Cain), or who equate us with Nazis (Newt Gingrich), and by supposedly small government conservatives who are focused in getting the government into our lives on the theory that we are not a religion but a cult (which so far as I can tell means to them a religion that they do not particularly like). They’re still a fringe, but they’re real people, they exist while the folks who supposedly will force mosques to hold same sex marriage ceremonies do not. I think we’ll overcome this as I said above, I think we’ll win this war, not because I believe in Islam (I do, let me be clear, I do, but believing in Islam doesn’t mean it has to be tolerated here, and now, it’s been extinguished in limited places at limited times before) but because I beli eve in America and its ideals and think history is on our side. But those who threaten us are real, and present, and a danger, and they are promising to rip up our social contract if they ever get a chance. And not a one of them is gay. Because it isn’t only our social contract they’re looking to rip up, not only our freedoms they seek to infringe, not only us to whom they’d seek to deny equality. So I say support same sex marriage and uphold the contract. Uphold it because you believe in it, or uphold it because you’ve signed on to it and it is your Islamic, ethical obligation to do so even if it recognizes behavior you find sinful and illicit. But either way, uphold it. Because there, and only there, will we ever find our place in this country. HAH Posted in Shari'a Blogs | « Random Thoughts on Slavery and the Shari’a Revisiting Same Sex Marriage as a Muslim Legal Realist » Leave a comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Name * ______________________________ Email * ______________________________ Website ______________________________ Comment _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
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