SCHOLAR DR.

UMAR FARUQ ABD-ALLAH

Part 1: Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah on hijabs and headscarves

BY RABEA CHAUDHRY, JUNE 30, 2010

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Chairman of the Board & Scholar-in-Residence at the Nawawi Foundation, a non-profit educational foundation based in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Abd-Allah offered me his insights into the growing phenomenon of Muslim women taking off their headscarves. The first part of a four part interview is published here:
The hijab is a highly charged symbol. How can we talk about a Muslim womans obligation to cover without the discussion implicating the other things that hijab has come to symbolize, such as identity and cultural resistance? Well, to begin with I think that we need to get rid of the word hijab because it is a cognitive frame and it carries with it lots of implications. It is not precise. What you are really talking about is the scarf and the Muslim womans obligation to cover her hair with a headscarf. The use of the word hijab to describe a Muslim woman's obligation to cover has made it possible for this obligation to become a touchstone by which a woman is judged as acceptable or unacceptable. Many prefer to use the word hijab in describing this obligation because it is in the Quran and because of the fact that it is enforced by the Quran. But the question is what is the hijab? The hijab is a way of living in which our families live in privacy and there is separation between private and public space. And now to take that reality which is very good and very helpful and which almost all of us follow and to attach that to the scarf, thats not fair, thats not right because then a womans covering becomes an issue of identity and an issue of highly politicized agenda. And I think that all of this needs to be set aside so that we can speak very honestly about the way that Muslim women should dress. We have to set our own cognitive frames. In setting our own cognitive frames we have to do so very honestly and very fairly. Islam is a religion of definition and everything that we believe in we define and it is so important to do that. So because we are talking about the scarf, we must remember that we are talking about an item of clothing. And this item of clothing and a womans obligation to cover her hair in public space is

obligatory according to the four Imams. If she doesnt do that then shes failed to meet that obligation. In some cases she may be justified in failing to meet this obligation. In others she may not. Now were talking about something very concrete. To clarify, hijab is something very different from the question of whether or not a Muslim woman wears a scarf to cover her hair. Hijab is essentially a mode of living in which those members of your family who are women and who are children and who are maharim who are forbidden from marriage to you because of their close kinship live privately in your home. In most of our homes and in our traditional architecture we have public areas in our house like a guest room and then we have a private area. Thats the hijab. During the time of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), the hijab was a veil, a curtain that was put in the room of the Prophet because ...it was a simple one-roomed house and so when people would come to visit him they would be sitting with him and his wives would be sitting in the corner. And people obviously wanted to look at his wives to see what they looked like, to see if they were beautiful. And thats not proper, so God put down the veil, the curtain, so that the Prophets wives would be put behind the curtain. So hijab in the sense that we have privacy in our lives cannot be challenged. Another aspect of hijab is that Islam requires us to live very upright lives. In order for us to live this kind of life of dignity, we endorse covering because we all cover, men and women. Shyness and a desire to be covered, these are essential psychological and moral values of Islam. Now that were speaking specifically about the question of a Muslim woman wearing a scarf to cover her hair in public, what is the nature of this obligation? A womans covering and the scarf are highly regarded in Islam and it is obligatory for a woman to cover her hair and wear the scarf according to the four Imams. But, it is not an act of worship. It is one of those aspects of law that is essentially rational and that pertains to social and private behavior. It has rulings that pertain to it, but it is something to which exceptions can be made and must be made in certain situations. And to say that a womans wearing of the scarf is just an issue of womens sexuality and so forth, thats not what this is about at all. [Yes,] the four imams do say that a woman should cover her hair and wear a scarf, but a woman can also go out into public [and] engage in society. How, if at all, is the obligation to cover affected by the mounting pressures that women face when they do publically identify as Muslim by wearing the headscarf? Again, the four imams say that its obligatory. But even if it is obligatory that does not mean that there cannot be licenses in which a woman doesnt wear a scarf. So, for example, after 9/11, Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayah and other prominent scholars were asked about women wearing scarves in public, which could expose them to danger and even to physical attack. And, Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayah as I recall, and I heard this from him and from others directly, said that if wearing the scarf in public threatens the womans life or brings her into danger, she should not wear it. And if she cannot take it off, then she should stay at home. And any jurists, any legists, who takes rulings right out of the book without looking at the social

reality, the psychological reality, the personal reality of our society and just says, This is the rule, they turn this religion into a procrustean bed. They make Islam completely unworkable. Again, I stress that the fact that women should wear scarves if they can and they should be respected for wearing them. But men also, especially those who stress the scarf, have to change their dress too. Dont expect women to go out dressed a certain way if you are not going to do something that publically identifies you as Muslim as well. Our modesty and shyness is one of our badges of honor. But to invert this and to make the woman exposed in public by the very act of her wearing a scarf, this is not right.

Part 2: Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah on hijabs and headscarves

BY RABEA CHAUDHRY, JULY 2, 2010

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Chairman of the Board & Scholar-in-Residence at the Nawawi Foundation, a non-profit educational foundation based in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. AbdAllah offered me his insights into the growing phenomenon of Muslim women taking off their headscarves. The first part of the fourpart interview can be readhere. The second part of the interview follows:
When talking about the Muslim womans obligation to cover, I have heard community leaders stress that a Muslim woman should think of herself as an ambassador of our community. This places a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of our women. It does. Especially at a time like this when Islam is so suspect and when ignorance about Islam and fear about Islam permeates many Western societies. Muslim women are often

feared to be Jihadis and to be terrorists just because they have on an item of dress. If she goes for an interview for a job it may be very difficult for her to get that. If shes a little girl in school, the other children dont really know how to associate with her. So youve really put a big burden on her. Now, if we lived in a society like 19th century Victorian America, a Muslim woman covering her head would have hardly raised an eyebrow. That was what a lot of women still did. And if you go back further than that, almost all women were covering their heads. But today because of the fact that in modern society women are often very much exposed physically in the way that they dress, when a Muslim woman begins to cover her body and put on a scarf she does stand out. She becomes a symbol for the community and that being the case, men should also do something comparable so that you can see this is the Muslim man and it is not just the woman who stands out. Without stressing that our men begin dressing in a way that does identify them as members of our community, the burden that our women carry is way too heavy. Without sharing this burden with our women, we are making our womens lives outside the home very difficult. This is dangerous because we should be active in society, we need to be out there, we need to be at the table so to speak, because if we are not at the table then we are on the menu. We have to be at the table, and we should live in society as a group. When our women are out there in their scarves, it becomes easy to wonder if this is a community of hidden males. And what is really interesting about this point is that because some of our men are concealing their Muslim identity in public and many of our women are exposing their identity by wearing a scarf, this becomes a violation of the basic principle of hijab because the woman is very private. The rules of hijab that divide our living space into public and private reflect that the woman, the baby and the child are the primary elements of that private sector. Let me be clear, of course she can come out in the public sector but she comes out wearing a scarf. And our men can come out in the public sector but they come out also dressing in a particular way. So when only our women come out dressed a particular way, then they are suddenly forced to become very public and the men who are not dressed a particular way can remain private.

When a Muslim woman in a scarf is coming out into public and she is totally exposed, the man is now in hijab. He is in hijab. Shes not in hijab. Shes wearing a scarf yes, but if we know what hijab really is, the man is in hijabbecause hes hidden. You cant see him, you dont know if hes a Muslim or Hindu, you dont know if hes an Arab Muslim, an Arab Jew, an Arab Christian or just white. The man is in hijab. That is what hijab means he is hidden from the public eye. She is not. She is the one who is absolutely out there, everybody knows it, so thats hard for her to bear. Getting the men into the dress issue is extremely important; we should have items of dress that we want our men to wear too. And again, all of this must be done with style and beauty and finesse. But to the degree that any type of distinctive dress is a mark of identity in society, whether we intend it to be or not, then men have to also carry that mark. They also have to be a public expression of that identity. I think that if we do that then over 50% of the problem is solved; maybe the whole problem is solved because then it becomes much easier on the women. I agree with you. When the duty of public representation of Islam is placed on our women, we are forced to deal with pressures and stresses that are often too difficult for us to bear. This is something that the men should be blamed for because we are physiologically and psychologically different. We [men] are people who God created to be able to confront difficulty and to alleviate the public pressure off of our women and I think the reason this is so difficult for women is because they are out there by themselves. Now, this is not the case for all women. There are women who are not broken by this pressure, and I think that this makes for women who are very strong. I know myself that I really admire any sister who wears the scarf in public and dresses in the proper dress according to Islamic Law. But I also know of girls and women who developed big psychological issues because of the fact that they feel so out of place wearing the scarf. So when a jurist, a legist, in Islam, comes to talk about this issue, he is nothing if he does not look at these problems that are associated with it and the lived experiences of these women.

And in acknowledging the fact that men and women are different and have different strengths, it is important to remember that men and women are equal in rights, men and women are equal in nobility, men and women are equal in spiritual capacity but we are very different. We are as different as night and day, we are as different as yin and yang. And that is the beauty and the secret of Gods creation. And the man is able to carry in public what he is supposed to carry. So if there is a burden you give me 90% and if you like you can carry 10. But for me to put 90% on you and to carry 10 myself, what in the world is that? How undignified, how shameful.

Part 3: Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah on hijabs and headscarves

BY RABEA CHAUDHRY, JULY 5, 2010

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Chairman of the Board & Scholar-in-Residence at the Nawawi Foundation, a non-profit educational foundation based in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. AbdAllah offered me his insights into the growing phenomenon of Muslim women taking off their headscarves. The first part of the fourpart interview can be readhere and the second part of the four-part interview can be readhere. The third part of the interview follows:
And if Muslim woman does find it too difficult to wear a scarf in public, can she still be modest? Can she be spiritual?

Yes, absolutely a woman can be modest without the scarf. Many American women Jews, Christians, Muslims are very proper and very modest. So, to label a sister who does not cover her hair as immodest, its like why? To say that you should wear the scarf because its an obligation and to say that it would be very dignified if you wore it, thats another thing. But to make a moral judgment against her because she does not wear the scarf, thats not right. The only judgment you can make against her is a legal judgment and that is that it is an obligation to wear the scarf and you didnt fulfill that obligation. From the standpoint of the law, you cannot judge her interior. You cannot judge her heart. All you can say is that outwardly she has failed to fulfill her obligation. Then we have to ask legally, Why didnt you fulfill that obligation? Maybe she has a justification for that, maybe she doesnt. Maybe she has the strength to do that, maybe she doesnt. God says in the Quran Obey God to the degree that youre able. So if shes not able to fulfill that obligation because it is too much of a burden for her, the psychological burden for her is too great, then shes justified in not fulfilling that obligation. She may still be a perfectly modest women who has the highest moral integrity and we cannot pass judgment on her. This is just as we cannot say that a woman who is covering her hair is a woman of integrity, because she may not be. Thats another question all together. We can only say that [a woman wearing a scarf in public has] fulfilled an obligation. Is she an honest woman? Is she a chaste woman? We cant tell that from her wearing a scarf. We cant make that judgment. And many women who dont wear scarves are very, very good Muslims and a number of Muslim scholars in the Muslim world have noted that, and theyve even said, Dont make judgments against women who dont cover their hair. And it may be that they pray five times a day and fast during Ramadan and fulfill all of their obligations, but it may be too difficult for them to fulfill the obligation to cover. The scarf must be nothing but an item of clothing. We cannot blow it up and conflate into the scarf issue all these other things. For instance, if we go back and talk about the way it was when there was slavery in the Muslim world, Muslim slave women were not required to wear scarves. Now, this is a difficult issue to talk about because slavery has been universally

condemned in the modern age, but if we look just at the question of slave women not wearing scarves and covering their hair, this was in all the schools of law to my knowledge and yet these women were Muslims and they were extremely pious Muslims in many cases. The whole issue of what it means to cover your hair, it should not involve any kind of moral judgment. In Islam we measure outward conformities in terms of whether or not you have fulfilled an obligation, whether or not you have fulfilled something that is recommended, or neutral, or if you have done something that is disliked or forbidden. Islamic law cannot go beyond that and this is one of its redeeming features - that the law is not making moral judgments on people. It is not saying whos going to Heaven and whos going to Hell. It is only saying that if you want to obey God, you should do such and such. And all of us ask the forgiveness of God because there is no one among us who fulfills all the obligations. After all, we are all human beings and legal judgments in Islam are never moral judgments. To think that they are, this is misinformation. And this is what the people of the cognitive frame of hijab as identity have done. They have mixed the whole thing up. This cognitive frame that a woman who doesnt cover her hair is immodest is an ideological weapon that has been used to give a woman no choice: if you dont wear this youre bad. But in Islamic law we cant make that judgment. This is what Dr. Sherman Jackson has talked about very eloquently when he talks about the misuse of the terms Islamic and un-Islamic because in Islamic law there is no such thing as Islamic and un-Islamic. There is obligatory, recommended, neutral, disliked, and forbidden. These are the legal categories and thats all we can say about an act. When we use the word Islamic to describe someones actions, that becomes a very loaded term and that person is seen as a really good person and someone acting in a way that is un-Islamic is seen as a bad person. These terms are strategies to manipulate peoples behavior. [This] is why we need to set the cognitive frames and we need to deconstruct these false cognitive frames and we need to be very careful about making these moral judgments about other people. We say [an act] is obligatory, recommended, neutral, disliked or forbidden. Thats the way we speak. Again we are people who are dignified and who are people of integrity. And the rules of the

law to me and to you and to us are blessed and sacred. I dont take Islamic law lightly at all. But for me to break an obligation may be obligatory sometimes. There are some times when you have to draw exceptions because of circumstances. And even if thats not the case, and I violate something I should not have violated, and all of us ask forgiveness thousands of times every year, then in that case in the end it is much better to break a rule than to break your psyche. A broken rule is easily repaired. We just say, I ask your forgiveness God, what did I do? I am sorry, I am on my hands and knees crying. Forgive me! God will forgive you a broken rule with such ease and such beauty. But a broken psyche, how can you ever mend that? And I have seen that and no doubt you have seen that more than I. I have seen women who really their psyches are broken or almost broken because of the rigidity of a community that has no understanding of how it practices Islam. And it requires her to bear this sociological and cultural burden that the man never carries or rarely carries. So here she is under siege in society. Shes got enough problems as it is and shes under siege and hes happy go lucky. He can go where he wants to go, he can mix with whom he wants to mix with. Thats not right, thats not fair.

Part 4: Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah on hijabs and headscarves

BY RABEA CHAUDHRY, JULY 7, 2010

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Chairman of the Board & Scholar-inResidence at the Nawawi Foundation, a non-profit educational foundation based in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Abd-Allah offered me his insights into the growing phenomenon

of Muslim women taking off their headscarves. The first part of the four-part interview can be readhere, the second part of the interview can be read here, and the third part of the interview can be read here. The fourth and final part of the interview follows:
I take from this that you are emphasizing that Islamic Law is alive, dynamic, and constantly responding to social realities. Yes, everything in the law has got to be finely tuned so that it works in the social reality. To be a jurist you have to understand reality and youve got to direct people to live and behave in a way that enables them to practice Islam in its fullest and to negotiate reality in the most effective way. The living tradition always leaves you in the present tense. Its almost difficult for me to accept that Islam does acknowledge and respond to personal capacity. I feel comfortable struggling because somewhere inside me a little voice is saying that if its not difficult then Im not doing enough. Thats really what I have understood a good Muslim and a good person to be someone who is constantly struggling. Islam is a constant spiritual and moral struggle for sincere obedience to God and selfperfection. Misunderstanding the nature of the moral and spiritual struggle of Islam is probably one of the core problems with Muslims today. We often make Islam rigid, and it is not meant to be that way. When you study hadith with a traditional scholar, often the first hadith you study is called the opening hadith. It says,

Those who show mercy [to others], the Most Merciful shows mercy to them. Be merciful to [all] who are on the earth, and He who is in the heaven will be merciful to you.
We always started the study of hadith here because this is a religion of mercy, and mercy comes out of love. For example, the Mawlid (the observation of the birth of the Prophet, peace be upon him) is meant to instill in us love and mercy by cultivating a deeper love for the Prophet. We should make the Mawlid one of the cornerstones of all our communities. It belongs to the central tradition of Sunni Islam and is completely consonant with the Quran and Prophetic Sunna. The great scholars of the four Sunni schools have consensus on its validity. The Prophet, peace be upon him, fasted on Thursdays because he was born on a Thursday, his wife Aisha used to recite to him the verses of poetry which his contemporaries had composed in his honor. The Mawlid has traditionally been regarded as one of the greatest of all acts of worship that draw us closer to God. Additionally, according to the renowned Quranic commentator Ibn Aashuur, the closing lines of Surat al-Tawba, the last chapter of the Quran to be revealed to the Prophet, accentuate the love and mercy that the Prophet felt for all humanity. They verses read:

Truly, a Messenger has come to you from among yourselves, one upon whom it weighs heavily that you should suffer in this life and the life to come, who is solicitous about you and your welfare, whose nature toward the believers is sheer kindness and mercy. So, if they turn away, say, God is all I need. There is no god but He. It is He upon Whom I have placed my reliance, and He is the Lord of the Magnificent Throne.
According to Ibn Aashuur, the first part of the verse was revealed about the disbelievers who had rejected the Prophet, and the end of the verse refers to the believers. It is as if the beginning of the verse is saying, You who saw this beautiful Prophet in your midst and disbelieved in him, know that this pained him deeply because he desired for you all that is good in this world and the next. This is really important because sometimes we ask questions like, Can we pray for non-

Muslims? The Prophet had a huge heart and his heart took in all humanity. He suffered with the suffering of the disbelievers. Who are we then, as Muslims, to be pompous and to be arrogant in this society? We have got to begin to cultivate in this community men and women who are truly rooted in this religion and who can represent it to us and to others in a way thats pleasing to God and his Prophet and doesnt break the psyche. You will then see then that traditional scholars are those who wont give you a guilt complex or make moral judgments against you. Islam is a religion of outward rules that are not arbitrary or rigid, and inward spiritual and moral guidelines. This Islam of rigid arbitrary rules is destroying us; hollow rules with no understanding or wisdom, no theology, no love of the Prophet, peace be upon him. We are currently suffering from a blight of religious extremism. The Prophet, peace be upon him, warned us against extremism and taught us that it has nothing to do with Islam. Religious extremism belongs to the Party of Satan (hizb al-Shaytan). Satan is himself an extremist and the greatest fanatic of history. The Sufis say that when you do an act of disobedience it requires one tawba, one act of forgiveness. When you do an act of obedience, it requires a thousand acts of forgiveness so that you do not become arrogant and proud and you do not look at yourself as better than others. Arrogance is the greatest sin of all, greater even than disobedience. Arrogance is the mark of the Khawarij, the outsiders, the rebels who destroy Islam in the name of Islam and who, according to our Prophet, peace be upon him, are the worst of all Gods creation. The numerous hadith about the Khawarij are among the most authentic and the most multiply-transmitted (mutawaatir) of Islam. Imam Muslims Sahih has an extensive treatment of them towards the end of his Chapter on Zakah. The Prophet, peace be upon him, warned us: There will come out of this religious community [of Islam] a people who will make you despise your prayer when compared to their prayer." He adds that we will despise our fasting compared to their fasting. He also says, peace be upon him: They recite the Quran [continuously] but it does not go deeper than their shoulder blades. That is, it does not enter their hearts and fill them with

light, mercy, and understanding. They will shoot out of [this religion of] Islam like an arrow shoots out of the bow. Their fanaticism has no spiritual foundation or religious depth. Because Islam is a religion of mercy and moderation, it ultimately rejects them and they ultimately reject it, and Islam returns to its normative beauty. Weve got to create a community in which its possible to breath. We must begin to set its own distinctive cognitive frames on the foundational principles of the Quran and Sunna and in a manner consistent with the four great Imams and the rich traditions of normative Islamic civilization. And then our Islam becomes human, beautiful, rational; it becomes common sense and most of the problems that we have they disappear.