Religious Obligations in Islam

They've been interpreted and re-interpreted ad infinitum. Islam, after all, is one-and-a-half millennia-aged. That's a long time in human history. Written history. And at that time the world was a far different place than it is now. Technologically, in any event.

Knowledge-wise, perhaps not so much. Societies were then more distinctly separated, and they would have it so. We think that the world was a more dangerous place then, but was it? In the micro-level, perhaps.

The kind of societal law and order that any nation relies upon to ensure the safety and security of all its people was largely absent in some countries of the world, but not all. Not to be compared, however, to what obtains in the modern world.

Yet, on the other hand, the cataclysmic armed disasters that one country is now capable of visiting upon another - at a remove, through the increasing development and use of weapons-at-a-remove - might quality this era as a potentially more violent time in history.

But in the instance of a desert society of nomadic tribes each suspicious of the other, preying on one another and each resisting the other's attempts at territorial securement, there was no universal law and order.

In the Middle East it was, quite simply, one distinct tribe against another; the territorial imperative at its most basic, primal level. Until they became unified through the auspices of a tribal religion.

A religion that reflected the disorder of the day, seeking to implement a universal message of control over the disparate parts of the whole, eventually - at least on the surface - pacifying rival tribes with the message of brotherhood in Islam.

Taking the best attributes of those cultures and clarifying them into a code of behaviour that reflected a spirit of peace - after centuries of Islamic conquest.

Now, Turkish religious scholars have undertaken to reinterpret the Hadith, a body of scripture that reflects the vision and parables and conclusions of the Prophet Muhammad, writing at that time for the edification and collectivization of a squabbling, desert-hardened community of communities. From whence comes Islamic law, Shariah.

The plan being to reinterpret the Hadith so it no longer reflects the conditions of life and society as it was at its inception, the birth of Islam. A prevailing culture that classified women alongside livestock as valued possessions indicative of wealth and standing. To reinterpret and reclassify some of the laws deliberately designed to ensure male domination over their weaker counterparts.

Which, in turn, gave assent to honour killings; justification for murder as a result of a woman's intended or unintended, guilty or innocent presumptuousness in bringing shame to her family. By becoming a victim of rape or incest, by assuming without due cause, that she had leave to enter a room, a vehicle, a public arena, where men were assembled.

All these prohibitions against women mingling in the company of men for their own protection. An awkward admission that men, practising Islam, are incapable of regulating their behaviour, of disciplining their basic animal urges, of civilizing the brute in themselves.

Therefore, women must take all necessary precautionary steps to ensure they do not awaken the beast in men. Equal, some would claim, but very, very separate.