Imam for Peace Sows Discontent

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Hassen Chalghoumi is the best-known imam in France and easily the most controversial, even though he preaches peace instead of hate. Police cars are stationed in front of his mosque during Friday prayers, and he has two bodyguards with him at all times when he goes out in public. Sometimes, when it all becomes too much for him, he takes his wife and their five children and goes away for a week or two, in the hope that all the excitement over him and the ideas he preaches will calm down again. But the tactic hasn't worked so far, because the whole thing flares up again as soon as he returns home. Chalghoumi has led a hectic life in recent weeks.

There are 5 million Muslims in France, although there could even be as many as 8 million, no one knows for sure. Some have been there for a long time while others are recent immigrants. Within this population, there are believed to be 1,400 women who wear either the large full-body veil, the burqa, in black or blue, or the niqab, the full veil that covers the face apart from the eyes, although that number could also be as low as 400. In any case, Chalghoumi dared to publicly condemn the wearing of the full veil, and he welcomed the idea of outlawing it -- something that may have been ill-advised.

Chalghoumi's is a man who doesn't reveal much about himself, while others seem to think that they know everything about him. What is indisputable is that he was born in Tunis in 1972, immigrated to France in 1996 and became a French citizen in 2000, or perhaps it wasn't until two years later. Sometimes Chalghoumi contradicts himself, or he doesn't remember the details correctly, or he is quoted out of context. It isn't easy to figure him out, but it is easy to like him. He is a gentle person, a man with the grace of a professional dancer.


More to read at http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,690303,00.html

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1. Abode of Islam - Abode of War

In the most rigid and widely repeated understanding, the Abode of Islam (Dar al-Islam) is that part of the world where the law of Islam, the sharia, prevails. The rest of the world is the Abode of War (Dar al-Harb), that is, territory whose inhabitants are to be warred against until they accept Islam or, for People of the Book (Jews, Christians, and, by interpretation, Zoroastrians and others), accept the status of being protected subjects, dhimmis, under Islamic rule without change of faith. Portrayed in this way, the division of the world into an Abode of Islam and an Abode of War seems to go hand in hand with the concept of jihad (holy war), and reinforces the image of Islam as an inherently warlike faith. However, there are reasons for regarding this portrayal as oversimplified and unrealistic.

The dichotomy between Abode of Islam and Abode of War does not appear in the Koran nor is it mentioned more than rarely in medieval Arabic geographical works. The concepts arose in the course of the evolution of Islamic legal thinking, and their relationship to actual political practice and territorial demarcation has varied greatly over the centuries from one Muslim regime to another. War and peace, domination and subordination, have tended to be governed by the exigencies of given situations more than by the requirements of legal theory. This holds true of many other aspects of Islamic political theory as well.

On the legal plane the reasons underlying the emergence of the concepts have as much to do with financial relations as with military activities. In the aftermath of the Arab conquests in the seventh century, a new ruling group, the Muslims, inherited the financial traditions of the Sassanid and Byzantine empires along with myriad treaties and other agreements made by Arab military commanders in terminating hostilities in various areas. It took more than a century for Muslim legists and administrators to sanctify a taxation system that would be consistent, easily understandable, and based upon the Koran or the deeds or words of the prophet Muhammad. It is in this context more than any other that the concern over the nature of treaties and the status of peoples in territories grained or lost in war was felt.

As in most other areas of Islamic law, particularly in the absence of specific Koranic revelation, there is broad range of legal opinion regarding the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. The most rigid interpretation holds that there can be no middle term between these two. But even then disagreement can arise as to what constitutes a lapse in the application of Islamic law in a territory passing from the first category to the second. Some have maintained that a land can remain in the Abode of Islam as long as a single provision of the sharia remains in force.

The more important divergent opinions revolve around the existence of an Abode of Truce (Dar as-Sulh) or Abode of Covenant (Dar al-Ahd) constituting a third and even fourth category of territorial division. The concept of an Abode of Truce is rooted in an agreement reached between Muhammad and the Christians of Najran in the Yemen and another entered into by an early Muslim governor of Egypt and the Nubians of the northern Sudan. The former had little practical effect, but the latter governed relations between the parties for many years. In return for certain obligations that could be construed as payment of tax or tribute, the non-Muslim party to such a truce may live in peace and independence. Whether this truce (sulh or hudna) is inherently temporary, and therefore not truly an alternative to the primary dichotomy, remains an issue for legal debate.

The concept of Abode of Covenant is not greatly different; but the non-Muslim party to the covenant, particularly during the Ottoman period, when such agreements were commonly made with the non-Muslim princes of newly conquered regions, is more clearly a tributary client of the Muslim party, with definite limitations upon total sovereignty. The model for this type of relationship is the agreement between Caliph Muawiya (661-680) and certain Armenian princes who retained their land and autonomy in return for yearly payment.

It is noteworthy that the legal acceptance of these intermediary states hinges upon the interpretation of the tribute payment as a form of legally and religiously sanctioned Islamic taxation, regardless of how the payment is interpreted by the party paying it. The importance of fiscal systematization as a factor underlying the creation of the categories is here quite evident.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the salience of these categories was slight in the thinking of the medieval geographers, who usually portrayed borders as being easy to cross and open to trade. The categories also took on a more symbolic than legalistic complexion during times of weakness or disruption, when orderly financial exploitation of the land deteriorated. For the medieval period, therefore, the Abode of Islam and Abode of War were most important as strict legal categories under the early Abbasid caliphs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (1955); Majid Khadduri, tr., The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani's Siyar (1966); and Frede Lokkegaard, Islamic Taxation in the Classic Period (1950).

Bulliet, Richard W.

Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 1, pgs. 20-21 (1982)