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PROOF Of
U.S.
TROOPS Committing SUICIDE in Iraq
was in U.S.
Media
but no One
Saw It.
We owe it to an avid reader of New Trend for
having discovered the news
of suicide by U.S. troops HIDDEN WITHIN the U.S.
media
itself. It's in
USA TODAY,
of July 17, 2003 on page 10A. It's a story
titled "U.S. Soldiers on alert
for Baathist holiday." At the end of paragraph
two in column 2, the wire
report says:
"Of the 77 U.S. service members who have died in
Iraq in accidents or other
non-hostile circumstances, at least five
committed suicide."
That's the kind of journalism for which a
student would get an F.
Surely by any standards of genuine
journalism, that report of AT LEAST
FIVE SUICIDES should have been on the top of
every news channel. Not only have
the TV
media
ignored the report, even USA Today
seems to have published it
unknowingly. Perhaps the editor did not
proofread the report and it got through
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QUR'AN
AND
HADITH
are BOOKS OF GUIDANCE, NOT OF
FIQH per se
[Comment on our discussion of the Qur'an 4:34.]
by Br. Shoaib, London, England
If the Quran was a book of law, it would be
structured
like a fiqh book; it isn't. In fact even a
Christian
historian of Islam, Marshall Hodgson, observed
that
the Quran does not follow the style of section on
law
in the old testament.
If we take it that the Quran is overwhelmingly
for
guidance, then we adopt a different style of
reading:
i.e. trying to get the message out. A benefit of
this
is that we don't have to become so literalist,
and
obsessesd by every point of grammar and sequence
of
words. A case in point is 4-34. In your
explanation
you have captured the main contribution of this
verse.
But then you spoil it by implying some sort of
abrogation. By doing that you are trying to take
away
the presumed action attached to this verse by
another
method, to the ahl quran people criticized.
Also the legalists will get hung up on things
like how
hard do we hit, or (in your case) can we still
hit, is
there a sequence of chastisement or not?, how to
apply
the punishment etc.
You mentioned the importance of hadith to
understand
context. One aspect of this should be to
understand
figure of speech in those days. (Something which
we
can never know perfectly - but we should
acknowledge
such a device is used in the Quran). Muhammad
Asad
frequently speaks of metonymical expression.
It could be that when a verse was first revealed
as a
response to a given situation, it could be
understood
by those people as a clear command. But later
when it
was interwoven into the final fabric of the
Quran,
being placed in the context of the other text of
the
Quran it acquired a more general purpose sort of
meaning.
In this case, I see this verse (like you do) as
setting the foundations for the institution of
marriage and using a language to really hit the
point
home. I.e.
man's job: Fund and protect the
family.
woman's job: to co-operate and not undermine this
project.
To double emphasise the seriousness,
i.e.
that this is not a lip-service institution, the
man is
told, that he is the in-charge responsible
authority.
Again to emphasise this is not lip service, it is
explained in terms of sanctions that can be made
available if cooperation in the project is not
forthcoming. Again to show that the sanctions
are
meant to be serious they are explained in plain
terms.
The net import of the verse is to set up a solid
foundation for the conventional marriage
relationship,
with some clear norms. Man holds it together and
the
woman MUST cooperate in that. Such things are
now
taken for granted - but as you point out, when it
was
a new idea God had to make a way to emphasise
this to
the people.
To take it as a blanket permission to hit the
wife is
not tenable, because, if we do a comparison with
legalistic terminology (such as old testament or
a
fiqh book) the required level of detail is not
there.
(i.e. I take that applying a punishment is not
something to be taken lightly and requires "due
process" to do it.) This is why there is
quibling by
literalists either over size of force, sequence
etc,
on the one hand and the ahl quran group who can
find
scope to use alternative meanings altogether.
Again for those people who use hadith and support
the
idea of beating, what we need from them is
evidence of
the "due process" from hadith. If there is no
crystal
clear procedure that comes out, then I submit
that all
such statements can be construed using a
metonymical
approach. (I.e. you must use "all means
necessary" to
make the marriage institution to work. Just as
you
wouldn't say
Malcolm X
said you could attack
people
because he used the expression "all means
necessary" )
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Note by
Kaukab Siddique:
Good points. In the
FINAL ANALYSIS, however, Islam
is the Sunnah of the Prophet (pbuh): his
understanding of the Qur'an is final.
He never raised his hand against a woman. Nothing
else matters for a Muslim
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2003-08-02 Sat 17:50ct