Trying to be a traditional modern Muslimah

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I've been studying Islamic law, mostly from the Shafi'i point of view, for six or seven months now. Pretty much just the basics - ritual purity and prayer, paying zakat, lawful and unlawful food, and the guidelines of interacting with the opposite gender. It's mostly interesting, often frustrating, and occasionally downright maddening, particularly when it comes to certain issues relating to women.

The shariah law (and the Qur'an and traditions it's based on) was established a long time ago, in a culture in which it was assumed that women would live with their families until they married, then if they were divorced or widowed they would return to their families or live with extended family or grown children. (Not that women could not work outside the home, or own a business, but rather those activities would normally take place within the larger culture in which people just didn't live by themselves, they lived with their families, whether blood related, adoptive, or by marriage.) That's a nice idea, and sometimes I wish we'd return to a closer approximation of that close family-based society. But that situation, the environment in which the shariah law was developed, does not correspond with "Western" culture at all, and this causes problems for women trying to live with respect for traditional law within these postmodern cultures. Some succeed by cloistering themselves in communities of like-minded Muslims, marrying relatively early and staying at home as housewives and mothers. Good for them, but that pattern does not work for all of us, especially, ESPECIALLY for converts with no Muslim family, who want to complete their education before marrying and who may even (gasp!) pursue a career as well as be a wife and mother.

So what's the problem? For one thing, shariah law doesn't know what to do with a woman independent of husband or family, who has to work to take care of herself. Traditional law requires her to obtain permission from her closest male relative or husband to travel without him outside her town. Even then, it doesn't allow for her to travel very far outside her city, or to be away from her home without a close male relative (father or brother, or son if she has a child old enough to fill this role) for more than 3 nights. Some traditional viewpoints don't allow a woman to travel outside of her city without a male guardian at all, but I consider that position to be truly too extreme to be enforceable, or reasonable, in any but the most traditional Islamic cultures in which women are still under the constant guardianship of a father or husband.

Without this male guardian, the only place the woman trying to observe the tenets of Islamic law could travel to for an extended stay would be the home of her close relatives. (But only if they don't do forbidden things in their home like drink alcohol or watch R-rated movies!) For those of us in graduate school, that means no out-of-state conferences if they're longer than the time permissible, no vacations with girlfriends, and absolutely no overseas travel.

And how does one even begin to apply shariah law to the woman who goes off to college by herself and lives with non-Muslim roommates? Or who has no family in her town and lives alone, working full time? If the law assumes she will live with family or be married, most women in Western cultures fall outside the scope of the law. Like me. Sometimes I get the impression, studying traditional jurisprudence, that until I'm safely married to a conservative Muslim man, everything I do, from school to work to every moment of my travel, is all haraam. This isn't the case, of course; Islam was not meant to be impossible, and it was not revealed in order to force all of us into a very narrow cultural mold. Shariah law, though based upon holy texts, is itself man-made (in the literal sense! by males), which Muslims seem to forget more and more the farther they get in time from the scholars who actively and rigorously debated the principles of the law so many centuries ago.

This is only one example of why the scholars of Islam, the trained and qualified teachers and jurists, need to enter into new discussions of how to apply the principles embodied by shariah law, in ways that respect the values enshrined in the law and in the texts it is inspired by, while accepting that most of us now live in cultures very different from the ones that shariah law was developed within. Let me make this point very clear: I am not, am not, am not advocating a wholesale rejection of tradition and traditional law. When one does that, the substance that the law points to is also lost forever. There is value in the thoughts and rulings of the ancient scholars, they are to be respected as our forebears in a long lineage of Muslim scholarship, not dismissed as irrelevant old men.

While I fear the excesses and loss of depth - of meaning - that other religions that have "reformed" and "modernized" have experienced in exchange for bringing their religion into conformity with contemporary culture, I fear as much the effects of fossilization upon a Muslim community trying to live within contemporary culture. The modernizers are already at work within Islam, encouraging us to discard everything except a fragile shell of the religion by telling us that the "heart" of the faith, usually called "compassion" or "love" or something else that sounds important, is the only thing that actually matters. These rituals we traditionalists cling to are all for show, all basically empty, and we are now "mature" enough to let go of them. We don't need to dress modestly, because modesty is really only "in the heart." We don't need to perform the daily ritual prayer, because prayer is an inner conversation with God and has nothing to do with ritual or outward expression. We don't need to fast, because we are now intellegent enough to understand the benefits of self discipline and we all know about the awful plight of the poor through the likes of those charity infomercials featuring starving African children. Islam, like some forms of "modern" Judaism and Christianity, is thus reduced to some pithy homilies and a lot of talk about philosophy, but minimal practice of putting into action the values we say we live by.

I would rather conform to old-school rules about when and where I can travel, about whether or not I may shake hands with a non-Muslim man, about what my proper role as a woman is, than to lose the meaning and the depth - that precious, undescribable sense of value and fulfillment - that the shariah as a body of law points to. As one of my teachers says, physical actions have spiritual effects, and it may be that a practice that one sees as irrelevant to modern life may actually have a profound impact upon one's spiritual life, over time.

This is the careful, knife's-edge balance that any scholar attempting successful religious reform has to attain. Most fall off in one direction or the other, to the side of non-negotiable tradition or the side of hollow assimilation. It is our responsibility to keep the shariah a living body of knowledge; not being a qualified scholar (and not likely to ever attain that level) I cannot do the work of reform myself. What I can do is to embrace the shariah, to learn it, to try to live it, and to then challenge my teachers and other scholars to understand the law in new ways, through my own experiences of living it.

If you, my unknown audience, find that you agree with anything I've said, then I challenge you to try it. If you don't have a qualified teacher nearby - a teacher from a strong lineage of other teachers - you can learn online. SunniPath, http://www.sunnipath.com/, has an excellent online academy with discounted tuition for full-time students, and the possibility of financial aid if you can't afford it otherwise. SunniPath even has a YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/SunniPathAcademy, where you can check out some of their material. I highly recommend Shaykh Hamza Karamali - he opened my eyes to the value of sacred knowledge, and is a good teacher and is very approachable. I've also heard excellent things about other teachers and other sites, so if SunniPath doesn't appeal to you then ask around, inshallah God will lead you to the teacher that is best for you.