The recent media storm that swirled around Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, following his 7th February lecture on Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective, prompted our Office of External Affairs to ask Dr Moojan Momen, author of An Introduction to Shi’i Islam and Islam of the Baha’i Faith to give us a short seminar on the subject of shari’a. Shari’a is a hot topic in the UK right now and we thought it would be helpful to try and get a better understanding of the shari’a, its history and application in the world today.

The Nasirol Molk mosque in Shiraz, Iran © travfotos under a Creative Commons licence.

I found this diagram, drawn by Dr Momen, showing the sources of the shari’a particularly helpful. Please note that most of it refers to Sunni Islam. The words and arrows in red refer to Shi’i Islam, which takes a different approach to shari’a in some respects, although the use of extreme punishments in Iran, the main Shi’i Islamic state, is just as marked as it is in Sunni regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

I asked Dr Tarek Heggy, who visited the UK Baha’i Centre on 28th February, what he thought about the move by the Turkish government to reinterpret some of the hadith, particularly those that have regressive effects on the rights of, for example, women. I got the impression that he thought this was an excellent idea. In fact, he seemed to want to go further and to delete the hadith altogether as unreliable and to rely only on the Qur’an. He was utterly dismissive of the narrow focus of much of the shari’a and of the way Muslim jurists use it to try to control every aspect of the lives of individuals and whole societies. This, he thought, was utterly destructive of individual initiative. Surely, he said, God is not concerned about trivialities such as whether men can wear gold or not - he himself wears a gold wedding ring, an act for which he has been admonished by fellow Muslims on more than one occasion. God is much more likely to be concerned about the love we show for our fellow human beings.

It’s worth reading this essay (and others) by Tarek Heggy, a Muslim who is actively seeking ways of reforming Islam and saving it from the destruction that faces it if Muslims continue in the militant model into which many have stepped.

Dr Heggy would, if I understand him correctly, like to see a much more flexible approach to personal life, law and government in Islam. Can this be done? Or is the Baha’i Faith already the reformed Islam that he would like to help bring into existence?

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