[In the following excerpt, Gibb discusses Islamic law and society as they exist based on the teachings of the Koran, focusing on the inequality of women in Islamic society.]

Since social ethics, social institutions, and law are, in principle, functions of the religious system in Islam, all these questions are tied up with religious orthodoxy to a much greater extent than they are in our Western civilization. The newer currents of thought on these subjects consequently flow in two different channels, which can be distinguished, theoretically at least, as the channel of reform and the channel of apologetic. But in practice it is sometimes difficult to say whether what appears to be apologetic is not really a disguised effort toward reform, by the device of defending what the writer asserts to be the genuine teaching of Islam on specific social questions.

Islam has often been described as a "totalitarian" religion. But all religious ideas that shape the imaginative outlook and content of the human mind and that determine the action of the human will are potentially or in principle totalitarian. They must seek to impose their own standards and rules on all social activities and institutions from elementary schools to law and government. Judaism is in this sense totalitarian; so also is Christianity. If we have forgotten it, it is only because from its earliest years Christianity was forced to recognize the authority of Roman law and because, when it seemed to be on the point of victory in its long struggle with Germanic feudalism in the Middle Ages, it had to suffer the assault of two new and deadly enemies: humanism and science. And science itself is coming very near to evolving a totalitarian idea, after breaking down the opposition of religion by its alliance with humanism and economic liberalism. If we may judge by the foretastes of it in Germany and Russia, indeed, scientific totalitarianism is preparing for the world a strait jacket of a stiffness and harshness beyond anything yet experienced by the human race.

Compared with this, the totalitarianism of a religious faith is a light and easy yoke. However "obscurantist" the religious authorities may be, they at least recognize the value and personality of the individual and so preserve for it a considerable range of liberty. In Islam, as we have seen, this liberty was further extended by the looseness of its organization, the absence of a hierarchy, and the principle of toleration of differences. But, like all totalitarian regimes, it attempted to control or to prevent the communication and spread of "dangerous thoughts."

It is worth our while to look a little more closely at the implications of this concept of "dangerous thoughts." Dangerous to what? To the fate of the individual? After all, if a man chooses to run the risk of eternal punishment in hell, that is his private affair. To purity of doctrine and the salvation of the community, which might be put in jeopardy by contamination? Possibly; but this is a little inconsistent in a society which recognizes "consensus" as normative. But discord in doctrine may lead to division and strife—this is the crux. The underlying conception is that a society cannot be stable unless it is permeated by the ethic deriving from a sound religious belief. The ethic cannot be stable unless the religious belief is maintained free from heterodox influences. Thus, not only is the preservation of the ethic more important than the flexibility and adaptability of society, it is the sole condition upon which the society can develop in the right direction, i.e., toward a higher degree of social integration and a more balanced life for the individual.

In other words, the kind of society that a community builds for itself depends fundamentally upon its beliefs as to the nature and purpose of the universe and the place of the human soul within it. This is familiar enough doctrine and is reiterated from Christian pulpits week after week. But Islam is possibly the only religion which has constantly and consistently aimed to build up a society on this principle. The prime instrument of this purpose was law. "The science of Law," in the words of one of the famous Muslim definitions, "is the knowledge of the rights and duties whereby man is enabled to observe right conduct in this life, and to prepare himself for the world to come."

Unlike the law which Christendom inherited from Rome, therefore, Islamic law takes into its purview relationships of all kinds, both toward God and toward men, including such things as the performance of religious duties and the giving of alms, as well as domestic, civil, economic, and political institutions. By its origin, nature, and purpose it is intimately bound up with the religious ethic. It is true that ethical judgments are concerned less with the outward facts of a given action than with motives and ends and that a formulated legal system has generally to be satisfied with the external facts. But their spirit and ultimate bases are the same. Both rejected the utilitarian argument that certain actions are good because of their social consequences, even if it could be (and often was) demonstrated that, in fact, they did produce desirable social consequences. It followed that Islamic law was not regarded (like Roman or modern law) as the gradual deposit of the historical experience of a people. Its primary function was to classify actions in terms of an absolute standard of good and evil; the fixing of penalties for infractions of the standard was a quite secondary matter.

Now an absolutely valid standard of good and evil is not a thing which can be rationally determined.… [The] Muslim mentality rejected all those ideal general concepts from which absolute standards could theoretically be deduced. The only means by which they could be known was revelation, for God alone knows what is absolutely good or absolutely evil, and it is, indeed, only by His determination that they are so. Consequently, the legal system of Islam begins with the Koran, and it evolved side by side with, and on the same lines as, the theological system. The legal maxims found in the Koran or deduced from it were supplemented by the authoritative traditions of the Prophet and further supplemented and cemented by the infallible consensus of the community. The four "schools" of Hanafites, Malikites, Shafi'ites, and Hanbalites are legal, rather than doctrinal, schools; and the dissident theological sects also constructed and developed their own legal systems on parallel lines.

We need not go further here into the principles and methods of these legal systems. It is more relevant to our purpose to appreciate the interaction between Muslim law and Muslim society. Every legal system presupposes that those persons to whom it applies are willing to recognize its authority and acknowledge it as binding upon them, even though they may from time to time take the risk of contravening its specific injunctions. The acceptance of Islamic law, then, was conditional upon the acceptance of the religion of Islam, but it also followed inevitably from the fact of becoming Muslim. The religion of Islam was accepted by a large number of societies, each of which had a long social and legal tradition of its own. In adopting Islam as their religion, the members of those societies also accepted in principle the authority of Islamic law.

It is obvious, however, that old social and legal traditions and institutions could not simply be abolished at a stroke. The religious leaders of Islam have, in fact, had to engage in a long and arduous struggle to extend the actual jurisdiction of Islamic law among all these peoples.¹ In this struggle they gained a very considerable measure of success, though there are still groups, like the Berbers of Northwest Africa, who are intensely Muslim in feeling but have even yet preserved their customary law in face of all the efforts of the ulema. Granted all this, however, the ulema, to the extent in which they have succeeded in imposing Islamic law, succeeded in unifying Islamic society, since the law, as I have suggested, was the instrument by which the social ethic of Islam was consolidated.

But here there are some distinctions to be drawn. Although the law embraced, in theory and in the exposition of the jurists, every branch and aspect of social relations, yet there were large areas in the life of the community where it was in practice ignored. The political and administrative institutions, a large part of penal jurisdiction, and most large-scale commerce lay outside its range of effective action, even if their procedures might sometimes be accommodated within its framework by means of legal fictions. Now it was precisely in these areas and among the classes concerned with them that European influences were first felt and have been most enduring and pervasive. This fact goes a long way to explain the—at first sight surprising—weakness of the resistance to the introduction into one Muslim country after another of constitutions, administrations, and penal, commercial, and civil codes based on European models, until today only Arabia and to some extent Afghanistan preserve the old Islamic legal institutions. It may even help to explain why the liberal modernists (since their ranks are largely recruited from those classes among whom the authority of the religious law was never absolute) so often take up a Western—that is to say, a critical and secular—attitude to questions of Islamic law.

But there was one domain, on the other hand, in which the social legislation of Islam was firmly intrenched—the domain of personal relations, including marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The reason for the firmness of its hold here lies not only in the universality of these relations, affecting, as they do, every member of the society, but still more in the fact that the basic regulations are clearly laid down in the Koran. As we have seen, no Muslims, except the very small rationalist groups, are yet prepared to question that the Koran is the very Word of God. To men who hold this belief the idea of changing or abrogating these fundamental laws is equivalent to apostasy. If, in any system, the gap between the conviction that change is necessary and the actual change in the law is not easily or quickly bridged, here (one would say) it can be effected only by a revolution, such as has taken place in Turkey. It is for this reason that in every Muslim country except Turkey the personal statute of Muslims continues to be administered not by the civil courts but by the religious or Shar'i courts. Not only so but, by the logical application of the same principle, the members of every different religious community have their own religious courts to administer their personal statute according to their respective systems of canon law.²

This field of personal relations, however, is precisely the one in which the modernist demand for reform and the controversy between modernists and conservatives are most vigorous. There can be no doubt that the social conscience of the educated classes is deeply stirred by the abuses associated with the practices of polygamy and divorce. To a lesser degree they are alive also to the serious consequences of the koranic law of inheritance and of the law (not directly based upon the Koran) which permits the constitution of inalienable family endowments. The Koran prescribes in minute detail the shares and proportions in which property is to be distributed among heirs and allots to female heirs, in general, half the shares of the equivalent male heirs. It is not difficult to make out a case for the equity of these rules when applied to movable property (which was the ordinary form of property in Arabia); but, when applied to agricultural lands or to industrial capital, the effects can be economically disastrous in given circumstances. As for inalienable family waqfs, or endowments (which were, in large measure, a device to overcome the koranic restrictions), they also have been the cause of much moral corruption and economic loss, and for some time past there has been a strong agitation in Egypt and some other countries to abolish the practice.³

It is easy to understand and to sympathize with the sincere Muslim reformer in the dilemma in which he may find himself. He is up against not merely the authority of a social tradition, which has more than a thousand years of unquestioned rule behind it, or the inertia of long-ingrained habit, or the natural reluctance of the average man to give up the privileges which he has enjoyed for so long. He has, above all, to face the fact that these social traditions and habits claim to be supported by direct and unambiguous texts in the Koran. For the secularist this obstacle does not have the same importance and validity, although secularists also, of course, are at pains to forestall the religious argument, so that one is not always sure whether a given book or article on the "women's question" in Islam is the work of a secularist or of a modernist reformer.

Examples of purely secularist argument can no doubt be found in recent Turkish literature and in India; more doubtful is the degree to which they represent any large body of Muslim opinion, except possibly in Turkey. For our present purposes it is more important to look at some of the ways in which Muslim reformers and apologists have tried to meet the difficulties.

In one of his most famous poems, which is quoted also by Iqbal, the Turkish poet and sociologist, Ziya Gok Alp (d. 1924), appealed for recognition of the legal equality of women:

There is the woman, my mother, my sister,
 my daughter;
It is she who calls up the most sacred
  emotions from the depths of my being.
There is my beloved, my sun, my moon, and
 my star;
It is she who teaches me to understand the
  poetry of life.
How could the Holy Law regard these
 beautiful creations as contemptible?
Surely the learned have erred in the
 interpretation of the Koran?

The foundation of the nation and of the state
 is the family;
So long as the full worth of the woman is not
 realized, the life of the nation remains
 incomplete.
The upbringing of the family must correspond
 with justice;
Therefore equality is necessary in three
 things—in divorce, in separation, and in
 inheritance.
So long as the woman is counted half the man in inheritance and one quarter of the man in marriage,
Neither the family nor the country will be
 raised up.⁴

But Ziya Gok Alp did not remain content with poetical protests; as a sociologist he undertook to find the principles by which the law could be reinterpreted. For this purpose he distinguished between the "divine" elements and the "social" elements in the Shari'a. The "social" elements, in his view, were based not on textual revelation but on 'urf. This word, which in the terminology of the jurists means "customary law," he defined as "the value-judgments of a people or of a given community." Consequently, personal or family law was open to modification in whatever way might be demanded by "collective opinion" (i.e., ijma) or by "the national conscience." Obviously, however, this attempt to draw distinctions is purely subjective; and the setting of customary law on an equal footing with the revealed law, even if it is regarded as the deposit of the historical experience or the character of a given nation, is irreconcilable with the bases of Islamic thought.⁵

I do not know of any writings by Arabic modernists which adopt a similar line of argument. The earlier Arab representatives of the feminist movement pressed, on the whole, for the removal of social rather than of legal disabilities. The Iraqi poet, Jamil Sidqi az-Zahawi, for example, was one of the first and most fearless critics of the social subjection of women and called again and again for a nobler and truer attitude toward them:

Woman and man are no other than equal in
 worth;
Educate the woman, for the woman is the
 symbol of culture.⁶

Still more outspoken is his poem entitled "Unveil!":

Take off the veil! For the veil, O daughter of
  Fihr, is a malady that saps the life of
  society.
Everything moves on to renovation, then why
 should this antiquity remain unchanged?
No command for the veil in this form has
 been given by any Prophet, nor approval
 expressed by any sage.
Alike in the eyes of the Sacred Law and of
 Nature, and in taste and reason and
 conscience is it blameworthy…

They have claimed that in the veil there is
 protection; they lie, for it is in truth a
 disgrace.
They have claimed that unveiling is a breach
 of modesty; they lie, for unveiling is perfect
 purity.
It is not the veil which guards the virtue of
 the girl; her guard is her upbringing and
 sharing in knowledge.
Cultivate the minds of the maidens, so that
 thereby the bodies of the maidens may
 remain secure from evil.⁷

Az-Zahawi, however, rarely does more than hint at the marriage and divorce laws. More outspokenly, a Tunisian socialist, Tahir al-Haddad, published in 1930 a book on Our Women in the Religious Law and in Society, in which he maintained that the laws of the Koran and the constructions of the Muslim legists must be regarded not as final and unalterable but from an evolutionary standpoint. The spirit of Islamic culture, he argued, demands a continual process of adaptation of their specific prescriptions to the development of civilization.⁸ The modern Arabic literature of Egypt also, in its portrayal and analysis of social problems, is penetrated by an implicit criticism of the legal obstacles to the full equality of women.

More striking still, among the first projects mooted by the new Ministry of Social Affairs set up in Egypt in 1939 was one to restrict polygamy and to limit the conditions of divorce. But, although the proposals put forward by the ministry amounted to no more than a very moderate instalment of the reforms desired by educated opinion, they called out an immediate remonstrance from representatives of the Azhar point of view that they were contrary to the Shari'a and that the ministry would be more worthily employed in turning its attention to horse-racing, betting, and other social evils denounced by the Koran and by Muslim ethics.

The true modernist cannot escape from his dilemma by such an easy cutting of the knot. The Koran must be true and final. And yet he is uneasily conscious that there is something amiss in the current Muslim social ethic. At the same time, it deeply wounds his feelings as a Muslim and his self-respect as a man to find that the only thing which the average Westerner knows about Islam is that a Muslim may have four wives; and the cruder missionary exploitation of his difficulties rubs salt into his wounds. He can see one, and only one, way out. The divinely given ethic of Islam cannot fall short in any way of the highest standards. Consequently, the medieval jurists must have in some respect deviated from the true spirit of the Koran and of Islam.

These deviations must be tracked to their source and discredited. When they have been cleared away, the original teachings of the Koran and of the Prophet will reappear in all their purity, their loftiness, and their evenhanded justice toward both men and women. These teachings will be concerned primarily with general attitudes; they will define the spirit in which the law is to be conceived and applied rather than the letter of the law itself. That spirit, in relation to women, cannot be other than one of human sympathy, of respect for their personality, and readiness to redress the wrongs inflicted upon them by the harsh and imperfect functioning of society. Only after this spirit is thoroughly appreciated and absorbed will the specific legislation of the Koran be properly understood. When all is done, the modernist claims, it will be seen that the Muslim attitude toward women, the Muslim conception of their personality and their social status, the Muslim legislation for their protection, are the highest and most humane of their kind, far surpassing those of any other religion.

This, then, is the task before the modernist. The primary function of the modernist apologetic, it must be repeated, is to restore faith in Islam among doubting Muslims by demonstrating the supreme excellence of their religion. Its second function is to persuade the "old-fashioned" Muslims that they, by their social conservatism and their stand upon the letter of the law, are sinning against the light. But side by side with this the modernist cannot resist the opportunity of wiping the smirk off the missionary's face by a violent denunciation of the sexual ethics of Christianity and a selection of relevant examples from the history and the social documentation of so-called Christendom. As in dealing with religious questions, therefore, apologetic and controversy are rarely separated. And it is not surprising that to Muslims who know the West only from the life of the great cities and from Western films, novels, and magazines, the sexual ethics and standards of Western society are beneath contempt.

Since it would obviously be impossible to deal with some hundreds of thousands of books and pamphlets and to sum up their contents, the general lines of modernist argument can scarcely be better illustrated than by analyzing the chapter devoted by Sayyid Amir Ali to "The Status of Women in Islam."⁹ It is true that the writer was a Shi'ite and that he adopts a rationalist standpoint toward the Koran. But he presents practically the whole range of modernist and apologetic argument on the subject, and more persuasively than most of the later writers and pamphleteers, who repeat his assertions in every Muslim language in more violent or more restrained tones.

In certain stages of social development, polygamy, or more properly speaking, polygyny,—the union of one man with several women,—is an unavoidable circumstance. The frequent tribal wars and the consequent decimation of the male population, combined with the absolute power possessed by the chiefs, originated the custom which, in our advanced times, is justly regarded as an unendurable evil.

The scientific tone, followed by the outspoken condemnation, in this first paragraph is impressive. It is followed by a series of brief notes on the marriage customs of various ancient races (selecting the most unfavorable features and based mainly on biased secondary works) and an argument that the early Christian church openly or tacitly permitted the practice of polygamy. "Even the clergy.… availed themselves of the custom of keeping several left-handed wives by a simple license obtained from the bishop or the head of their diocese."¹⁰ "The greatest and most reprehensible mistake committed by Christian writers is to suppose that Mohammed either adopted or legalised polygamy." He found it practiced not only among the Arabs but also among the Persians and the Jews, together with many other customs degrading to women.

The Prophet of Islam enforced as one of the essential teachings of his creed, "respect for women." And his followers, in their love and reverence for his celebrated daughter, proclaimed her "the Lady of Paradise," as the representative of her sex. "Our Lady of Light" is the embodiment of all that is divine in womanhood,—of all that is pure and true and holy in her sex,—the noblest ideal of human conception. [It will be remembered that Amir Ali was a Shi'ite.] And she has been followed by a long succession of women, who have consecrated their sex by their virtues. Who has not heard of the saintly Rabi'a and a thousand others her equals?

The apologist goes on to claim, with a mixture of accuracy and exaggeration, that Muhammad secured to women rights which they had not previously possessed, that he "placed them on a footing of perfect equality with men in the exercise of all legal powers and functions," and that he restrained polygamy by limiting the "maximum number of contemporaneous marriages" to four, but with the proviso that "if you cannot deal equitably and justly with all, you shall marry only one." This proviso is regarded as extremely important; "as absolute justice in matters of feeling is impossible, the Koranic prescription amounted in reality to a prohibition."¹¹

But polygamy depends on circumstances, and "the elasticity of laws is the greatest test of their beneficence and usefulness":

This is the merit of the Koranic provision. It is adapted alike for the acceptance of the most cultured society and the requirements of the least civilised… The blight that has fallen on the Moslem nations is due to the patristic doctrine which has prohibited the exercise of independent judgment [Utihad]. The day is not far distant when an appeal to the Teacher's own words will settle the question whether the Moslems will follow Mohammed or the Fathers of the Church, who have misused the Master's name to satisfy their own whimsicalities, or the capricious dictates of Caliphs and Sultans, whose obsequious servants they were.¹² But such a consummation can only result from a general progress in the conception of facts, and a proper understanding of the Prophet's teachings.…[As things are,] the feeling against polygamy is becoming a strong social, if not a moral, conviction. It has become customary among all classes of the [Indian Musulman] community to insert in the marriage-deed a clause, by which the intending husband formally renounces his supposed right to contract a second union during the continuance of the first marriage. Among the Indian Musulmans ninety-five men out of every hundred are at the present moment, either by conviction or necessity, monogamists… It is earnestly to be hoped that, before long, a general synod of Moslem doctors will authoritatively declare that polygamy, like slavery, is abhorrent to the laws of Islam.

This discussion is followed by several pages devoted to Muhammad's own marriages, to rebut the accusation that they were due to self-indulgence and "conclusively establish that the man, poor and without resource himself, when he undertook the burden of supporting the women whom he married in strict accordance with the old patriarchal institution, was undergoing a self-sacrifice of no light a character." He then turns to the subject of divorce, which he handles on lines similar to those of his argument on polygamy.

This subject, he says, "has proved a fruitful source of misconception and controversy; but there can be no question that the Koranic laws regarding the treatment of women in divorce [note. not 'regarding divorce'] are of better humanity and regard for justice than those of any other scripture." Then come the usual scrappy notes about ancient usages and an argument that what Gibbon called "the ambiguous word which contains the precept of Jesus" was "laid down probably to suit the requirements of an embryonic community, and delivered verbally," though "it may be regarded as inculcating a noble sentiment."

Muhammad, though disapproving of divorce, found it "impossible, under the existing conditions of society, to abolish the custom entirely." "The custom was not an unmixed evil; and accordingly he allowed the exercise of the power of divorce to husbands under certain conditions." "The reforms of Mohammed marked a new departure in the history of Eastern legislation"; nevertheless, "the permission in the Koran has to be read with the light of the Lawgiver's own enunciations." "The Fathers of the [Islamic] Church," on the other hand, "have taken up the temporary permission as the positive rule, and ignored many of the principles of equity inculcated by the Master." But, for all that, "the rules laid down by the legists are far more humane and just towards women than those of the most perfect Roman law developed in the bosom of the [Christian] Church."

Lastly, the apologist attacks the problem of the seclusion of women, or purdah, as it is called in India. Beginning with the observation that it is one of the survivals of older institutions which "have had the tendency to retard the advancement of the Mohammedan nations," he allows that "the system of female seclusion undoubtedly possesses many advantages in the social well-being of unsettled and uncultured communities." Muhammad

perceived its advantages, and it is possible that, in view of the wide-spread laxity of morals among all classes of people, he recommended to the women-folk the observance of privacy. But to suppose that he ever intended his recommendation should assume its present inelastic form, or that he ever allowed or enjoined the seclusion of women, is wholly opposed to the spirit of his reforms.

And he justly adds that "the Koran itself affords no warrant for holding that the seclusion of women is a part of the new gospel." Attention is drawn to the gloomy and bitter misogyny expressed by the Christian Fathers; the universal repression of women in Christianity at a time "when Mariolatry was recognised and practised by all classes"; and the immorality attested in the convents. "The rise of Protestantism made no difference in the social conditions or in the conception of lawyers regarding the status of women. Jesus had treated woman with humanity; his followers excluded her from justice." The source of that more exalted ideal of womanhood which has become current in the recent centuries is to be found in the chivalry of the desert, transmitted to the West by means of the Crusades and the troubadours. Even so, it was contaminated by the coarseness of "the barbarian hordes of Europe," whereas "in the early centuries of Islam.… women continued to occupy as exalted a position as in modern society." Moreover, in spite of the improvement in the social position of Western women, "what is their legal position even in the most advanced communities of Christendom?" Therefore,

the Teacher who, in an age when no country, no system, no community gave any right to woman, maiden or married, mother or wife, who.… secured to the sex rights which are only unwillingly and under pressure being conceded to them by the civilised nations in the twentieth century, deserves the gratitude of humanity. If Mohammed had done nothing more, his claim to be a benefactor of mankind would have been indisputable.

If this summary in any way misrepresents the character of Amir Ali's argument, the misrepresentation is certainly not deliberate. It is, as will have been observed, the argument of defending counsel—here and there conceding an unimportant point in order to cover up tacit omissions, playing down his opponent's case, exaggerating (and even inventing) weaknesses in it, and equally exaggerating or inventing points in his own favor. Yet he makes his task much easier by his assumption throughout that the koranic legislation was the work of Muhammad himself and that "each age has its own standard." How much more, then, must those more orthodox apologists who are denied recourse to these supports rely upon the same casuistical and rhetorical devices in presenting the same case?

Yet there is no wilful deception in all this. It is the expression of a completely genuine belief combined with a strong feeling of resentment at the assumed superiority of the Christian social ethic. The superficiality of its historical method, the evasion of difficulties, the recourse to ipse dixit's, are only the outcome of that intellectual confusion with which the whole modernist movement is burdened and which makes it easy to shut one's eyes to what one does not with to see. Even Iqbal is caught in the same snare.

In his sixth lecture, which deals with the problems of law and society, the unresolved conflict between the two currents of his thought is most clearly displayed. After referring to the "dynamic outlook of the Koran," which "cannot be inimical to the idea of evolution," he urges that "in a society like Islam the problem of the revision of old institutions becomes still more delicate, and the responsibility of the reformer assumes a far more serious aspect." "Islam, by means of its well-conceived institutions, has succeeded to a very great extent in creating something like a collective will and conscience" in the "heterogeneous mass" of its adherents.

In the evolution of such a society even the immutability of socially harmless rules relating to eating and drinking, purity or impurity, has a life-value of its own, inasmuch as it tends to give such society a specific inwardness, and further secures that external and internal uniformity which counteracts the forces of heterogeneity always latent in a society of a composite character. The critic of these institutions must therefore try to secure, before he undertakes to handle them, a clear insight into the ultimate significance of the social experiment embodied in Islam. He must look at their structure, not from the standpoint of social advantage or disadvantage to this or that country, but from the point of view of the larger purpose which is being gradually worked out in the life of mankind as a whole [pp. 158-59].

So far, this is not only sound Islamic doctrine but also (pace Mr. Smith) sound religious insight and a well-merited rebuke to the externality of the ordinary modernist approach to these questions. But lqbal goes on to say:

I know the Ulema of Islam claim finality for the popular schools of Mohammedan Law.… but since things have changed and the world of Islam is to-day confronted and affected by new forces set free by the extraordinary development of human thought in all its directions, I see no reason why this attitude should be maintained any longer. Did the founders of our schools ever claim finality for their reasonings and interpretations? Never. The claim of the present generation of Muslim liberals to reinterpret the foundational legal principles, in the light of their own experience and the altered conditions of modern life is, in my opinion, perfectly justified [pp. 159-60].

On turning to deal with our present subjects, however, he by-passes entirely the problem of divorce to concentrate on the easier problem of inheritance. Referring to the poem of Ziya Gok Alp which has been quoted above, he asks

whether the equality of man and woman demanded by him, equality, that is to say, in point of divorce, separation, and inheritance, is possible according to Mohammedan Law. I do not know whether the awakening of woman in Turkey has created demands which cannot be met.… without a fresh interpretation of foundational principles… In view of the intense conservatism of the Muslims of India, Indian judges cannot but stick to what are called standard works. The result is that while the peoples are moving the law remains stationary.

Unperturbed by this astonishing self-contradiction, he proceeds:

With regard to the Turkish poet's demand, I am afraid he does not seem to know much about the family law of Islam. Nor does he seem to understand the economic significance of the Quranic rule of inheritance… From the inequality of their legal shares it must not be supposed that the rule assumes the superiority of males over females. Such an assumption would be contrary to the spirit of Islam. The Quran says: "And for women are rights over men similar to those for men over women." The share of the daughter is determined not by any inferiority inherent in her, but in view of her economic opportunities, and the place she occupies in the social structure of which she is a part and parcel [pp. 160-61].

It will be granted, as I have already said, that a case can be made out for Iqbal's view that "it is really by this apparent inequality of their legal shares that the law secures the equality demanded by the Turkish poet" (p. 162). But in attempting to prove that no assumption of the inferiority of females to males can be justified from the Koran, he has (quite unconsciously, I believe) shut his eyes to the fact that the immediately following words in the very verse which he has cited for this purpose are: "but men have a standing above women."¹³

If we turn from the theory of the modernists to their practice, we shall find some wide divergences. I am very doubtful whether, outside Turkey, there is to be found in the Islamic world today any considerable section of society in which women do enjoy something like the social equality which the modernists demand, except for the Westernized middle classes of Egypt. It is true that in many Muslim countries the education of women has made great strides and that there has been some general shift in the direction of the social emancipation of women; but even in Egypt their range of economic opportunity is still narrowly restricted. In India, as Mr. Smith has written, purdah "is still widely defended as the only alternative to the most horrible licence… Still to-day a very large number of otherwise intelligent, liberal and well-to-do Muslims observe purdah, or rather make their wives and daughters observe it. Thus the under-cover retreat from defence of polygamy to that of purdah almost stops at the latter outpost… The retreat stops virtually dead when it reaches segregation of the sexes."¹⁴

To this general rule, he asserts, Iqbal was no exception:

He never understood, and he constantly fought against, those who deem that women too might share in the brave new world. He imagined European women heartless, hating maternity, love and life; he wanted to keep women "pure" and in subjection. For women he wanted no activism, no freedom, no vicegerency of God.… Woman should remain as she has always been in Islam, confined, acquiescent to man, and achieving nothing in herself but only through others. She should remain a means to an end. Iqbal kept his own wives in purdah, and untiringly he preached to the world his conception of the ideal woman:

The chaste Fatimah is the harvest of the field
 of submission,
The chaste Fatimah is a perfect model for
 mothers.…
She who might command the spirits of heaven
 and hell
Merged her own will in the will of her
 husband.
Her upbringing was in courtesy and
 forbearance;
And, murmuring the Quran, she ground corn.

And yet Iqbal towards the end must have recognized that he was wrong about women. There is a hint of this in his small poem 'awrat.… [which] concludes:

I too at the oppression of women am most
  sorrowful;
But the problem is intricate, no solution do I
 find possible.¹⁵

Is it going too far to suggest that this confession of failure sums up the whole modernist position? The dilemma, real enough though it may seem to the Western-educated middle classes in Egypt and India, is no dilemma at all for the great body of Muslim society. It has arisen in these particular places and circles, not out of an organic evolution within Muslim society, but out of the superimposition of a different social order professing a social ethic which has never been accepted by any Eastern society as a universal rule, even though monogamy is, and always has been, the general social practice. The claim made by Iqbal for "the present generation of Muslim liberals to reinterpret the foundational legal principles" is, in effect, a claim that a small, self-constituted minority shall remodel the social institutions of one-seventh of the human race. And what the moral and intellectual qualifications of that minority are for such a task we have already seen. No wonder that the religious leaders ask on what authority they propose to do this! They cannot claim, for all their ingenuity, the authority of the Koran or the authority of the prophetic tradition. There remains only one source of authority, that of ijma', the consensus of the community.

We need not doubt, I think, that the logic of history will, in the long run, as the modernists foresee, bring about widespread changes in the attitude of the Muslim community toward these problems. Already, indeed, the abuse of the liberty of divorce is recognized, in orthodox as well as in modernist circles, to be the cause of serious stresses in Muslim society;¹⁶ and others are likely to arise as the education of women widens in range and quality.

It is to be put to the credit of the modernists that, in opposition to the secularists, who wish to sever social institutions from all connection with the religious ethic or law, they continue to recognize the essential relation between social behavior and religious belief. They have preserved enough of that Islamic solidarity in their thinking to see that, if society is to be reformed, reform must come through the religious channel and not independently of religion or even in opposition to it. Where they have erred is in assuming as the final objective an ideal determined by considerations external to their own society and in trying to force the two into relation with one another. This is to ignore the differences between Muslim society and the Western societies in composition, geographical and economic conditions, and intellectual outlook; and it can be achieved only at the cost of lifting the argument out of the plane of realities and evading the concrete issues.

It is safe to say that, when, eventually, such social strains develop on a general scale within Islam by the forces of internal evolution, they will find their own appropriate solutions. These solutions will not necessarily coincide with our Western solutions but will be based on the proved experience and needs of the Muslim peoples. And we may be sure that the principles applied to their solution will be practical and realistic and far removed from the intellectual confusions and the paralyzing romanticism which cloud the minds of the modernists of today.

Notes

¹ This was so, even if the conflict was to a great degree softened by the readiness of most Near Eastern peoples to accept Islamic law in preference to the ecclesiastical law of Byzantium or Zoroastrian Persia.

² I have omitted all discussion of proposals for reform of the Shar'i courts and codification of Shar'i law, since these concern only modifications of procedure, without affecting the general principles of the administration and application of the religious law (but see also n.16 below).

³ See A. Sékaly, "Le Probleme des wakfs en Egypte," Revue des etudes islamiques, Vol. III (1929); and J. Schacht in Der Islam, XX, 215-23. The reformers distinguish, as a rule, between genuinely charitable waqfs (awqa f khairiya), intended for the endowment of religious and charitable institutions, and the private or family waqfs (awqa f ahliya), intended to benefit a particular family or individual.

⁴Ziya Gokalp: sa vie et sa sociologie, by Findikoglu Ziyaeddin Fahri (Paris, 1936), p. 240; Iqb 1, Six Lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 153.

⁵ The jurists go so far as to admit that local custom may be (or even ought to be) observed when it is not repugnant to a text or indication in the Koran or the prophetic tradition, but not otherwise except under plea of "overriding necessity." An argument similar to that of Ziya Gok Alp, on a wider scale, was put forward by Jalal Nuri Bey in Ittihad-i Islam (Constantinople, 1913; Arabic trans., Cairo, 1920), pp. 42 ff. The legal view of 'urf or 'ada is summarized in the official commentary on the Mejelle, arts. 36 ff.; and the Azhar view in Nur al-Islam, I, 534-40.

⁶Al-Lubab (Baghdad, 1928), p. 126; G. Widmer, Ubertragungen aus der neurarabischen Literatur, Vol. II: Der iraqische Dichter Gamil Sidqi az-Zahawi (Berlin, 1935), p. 38.

⁷Al-Lubab, pp. 235-36; Widmer, op. cit., pp. 44-45.

⁸ See Oriente moderno, XI (1931), 39-41; Rudi Paret, Zur Frauenfrage in der arabisch-islamischen Welt (Stuttgart, 1934), pp. 17-18.

⁹The Spirit of Islam (2d ed.; London, 1922), chap. v, pp. 222 ff.

¹⁰ This statement is buttressed by reference to two of Hallam's works. The Constitutional History of England, I, 87 and note, and Middle Ages, p. 353, The passages in question appear to be the following. From the former: "It appears to have been common for the clergy, by licence from their bishops, to retain concubines, who were, Collier says, for the most part their wives." From the latter: "In every country, the secular or parochial clergy kept women in their houses, upon more or less acknowledged terms of intercourse, by a connivance of their ecclesiastical superiors, which almost amounted to a positive toleration." It is difficult to believe that so accomplished a master of English as was Sayyid Amir 'Ali could have been so unfamiliar with English usage as to assume that the use of the plural in these passages implied a plurality of wives or concubines.

¹¹ It may be noted in passing that this ingenious argument is part of the stock in trade of all feminist and most modernist writers. But it is false, although it has the support of Muhammad 'Abduh (Ta'rikh al-Ustadh al-Imam, II, 113 ff.), and the doctors of al-Azhar have no difficulty in disproving it and rejecting it outright (Nur al-Islam, II, 564-72; V, 528-29).

¹² This unjustifiable and, indeed, foolish attack upon the probity and religious loyalty of the great founders of the schools of law, though not, perhaps, unexpected in a Shi'ite writer, is also, unfortunately, characteristic of much modernist argument.

¹³ Sura, 2:228: walahunna mithlu 'lladhi 'alaihinna bi'lma'rufi wali'rrijali 'alaihinna darajatun.

¹⁴ Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India (Lahore, 1943), pp. 80-81.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 165.

¹⁶ See, e.g., an article by 'Abbas Taha in Nur al-Islam, VI, 263-69, approving the modifications introduced into family law in Egyptian legislation of 1920 and 1929 (on which see Schacht, op. cit., XX, 223-33). But orthodox writers show no reluctance to defend polygamy and the right of repudiation in principle (e.g., Nur al-Islam, II, 564-72 and 706-13; and Farid Wagdi, ibid., V, 528-38). The generally similar position of Rashîd Ridâ and the Salafiya is summed up by Henri Laoust in Le Califat dans la doctrine de Rashîd Ridâ (Beirut, 1938), p. 262, n. 35; and in fuller detail by Paret, op. cit. For India see Smith, op. cit., pp. 79 and 321. The chief weakness in much of this polemic is the argument that the social ethic based upon the Islamic recognition of polygamy is better than that of the Christian law of monogamy corrupted by prostitution. The argument might be accepted if this were a true representation of the facts; but it involves shutting one's eyes to the fact that prostitution has always been and still is widespread in Islamic society, quite apart from the legalization of concubinage with slavewomen.