its a week later and we are still waiting for you to dazzle us

Thank you for this insightful look at Islamic fiction, even if I disagree with some of your points.

To answer what seems to be the main question, i.e. if can a book be halal if it includes haraam behavior, I would suggest that there is a simple test.

– If the haraam behavior is explicit, glorified, dignified or excused, then the book isn’t Islamic. An example would, in my opinion, be Monica Ali’s Brick Lane in which the main character is “set free” from Islamic “constraints” by having an affair and justifying it.

- If the haraam behavior is present to show that even the most well- meaning Muslims have faults and make bad decisions, but the intent is to show the character grow and improve in their deen and/or learn a lesson from the bad behavior, then the book is Islamic.

For the record, there is alot more genuinely Islamic fiction out there than people seem to realize. Often it is difficult to find a publisher, or difficult to get it into mainstream stores. I would recommend that Muslims who are interested in supporting Muslim writers check out organizations like the IWA (www.islamicwritersalliance.net), and Islamic Artists Society (http://islamic-artists.blogspot.com) to see what is really out there.

what if in the present muslims have killed people who said things they didn’t like?

Do you intend to make an intelligent and/or constructive point anytime soon?

Its the journey of a Mormon to Islam through his meeting Indonesians in Japan.

It was the first English Muslim novel I ever heard of and read.

I’ll respond fully when I have time, but really, your defensive reading of my posts is just … amazing.

See the last paragraph. It is perhaps the least “amazing” thing for the majority of the world’s population.

But truth be told, this seeming “defensiveness” is merely the dance of shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. I’m not really being defensive, if that implies some kind of less than sanguine emotional response. I’m merely applying the Socratic dialectic; the most wonderful of intellectual inventions that the Greeks gave to humanity; the foundation-stone of “Western” discourse. If anything, rather than being amazed at the employment of this device, you should be entirely at home with it. I find it amazing that you’re not.

Kind Regards,
EM.

Some quasi-random comments on what has been said so far.

You have suggested you have not been making arguments. I suggest that you have been making arguments, just that they are not well formed. Here is an example (a rational reconstruction, if you will).

You started out wondering why some forms of representation (doubling as art) are “outlawed” in Islam. The answer given was basically: where the intention of the representation is to induce sinful thoughts and/or behaviour, or it is likely to induce sinful thoughts and/or behaviour (irrespective of intention), it is forbidden.

Because you have personally benefited from works which could easily induce sinful thoughts and/or behaviour, you seemed worried about two things:
(a) Muslims would be (or are) missing out on something beneficial – and this is peculiar to Muslims; and (b) were the “ban” to be extended to non-Muslims, you and others would no longer benefit from such works.

There are two underlying assumptions here. One is that because you have personally benefited from some art forms, others will also benefit from those art forms. The other is that “forbidden to Muslims” entails that from the Islamic point of view it should be “forbidden to everyone.”

You have not provided adequate support for either of these assumptions.

You have attempted to support the first assumption by asserting that “educated” people know as a matter of objective fact (i.e., not merely as a subjective opinion) that Ulysses is a great work of art. The evidence supporting this is that “scholars” (by which one assumes you actually mean academics in English Departments) unanimously agree with you. First off, this not a valid argument. It is merely an example of the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam. If there is nothing more to your argument that this, it is easy to counter: either you have to concede that those who think Ulysses is worth the candle only make up a tiny, tiny fraction of a particular culture at a particular historical juncture, and that outside this culture and juncture, next-to-no-one at all would think it is worth cutting down a single tree to print it, thus rendering the claim that it is objectively true that the book is “great” questionable to say the least, or you have to (as you have effectively done) define literary competence according to whether one agrees Ulysses is a great work of art, in which case, one is not establishing anything, but rather merely defining outcomes according to desired conclusions (i.e., the petitio principii fallacy).

Needless to say, the fact that for Muslims “learned people [exist] who can make judgements that are not (in a sense) subjective,” does not necessarily extend to questions of aesthetic opinions. When ulama make statements about, say works of fiction or poetry, they are, by and large, not expressions of opinion about aesthetics but about whether content is, say, in conformity with halal intentions, thoughts and perhaps outward effects, as per the shariah.

As to whether Joyce himself is “one of humanity’s treasures,” I would agree with that. I would also say, however, that my grandmother, who has never written a word of fiction in her life, is also one of humanity’s treasures. For us to start ranking the worth of individuals according to some very recent historically and culturally specific criterion is not a road anyone should want to go down, morally speaking.

As a side issue, you have suggested that the problem of “forbidden” work is unique to Muslims. To support this assertion, you have suggested that Jews (one assumes you actually mean people following Judaism), Hindus, Christians “and so on,” have no such “issues.” This is quite obviously false. Perhaps you should have a look around. In Israel, try publishing a rip-snorting fictional glorification of Auschwitz. Better yet, try staying out of gaol! Is there anything holding Pope Benny back from writing (or reading) that new, provocative and deeply confronting one-man play, The Alter Boy Monologues ? Oh of course, his religious beliefs. Ah, but what of the ever-tolerant Hindus? Well, here’s a challange: write a novel about Chhatrapati Shivaji, and hint at the possibility of an elicit relationship with his mother without it getting banned by Hindus in India. …And so on and so forth.

Related to this, you make the general claim that there is no benefit in censoring any literature or art whatsoever. That is certainly something that has been debated for over 2000 years – and as noted in the above examples, is denied by manyof different faiths even today. As such, it is not exactly a self-evident or settled truth.

The second assumption is a matter of fiqh, and the rulings for different works are different for different times and different places, depending as they do on all sorts of particular factors. To claim that there are “transhistorical, universal, blanket rules” for such matters is merely to advertise one’s ignorance. As for Australia, for example, the entire issue is completely irrelevant, except as a matter of personal choice. (Incidentally, the very notion of “forbidden” – even for Muslims – can take on different manifestations. E.g. it does not necessarily mean “imposed by the state on the people, irrespective of their wishes” – which is what most Westerners seem to believe and be fearful of; it can merely mean, “imposed upon oneself by oneself, in accordance with one’s own intentions.”)

As to your question, why are your posts being answered defensively (or perhaps offensively), the answer, at least from my perspective, is that some of your comments have the odor of an arrogant cultural imperialism that many Muslims are able to detect a mile off (thanks largely to the accretions of colonial history combined with the current political climate). That you are not able to detect this odor is understandable. (When Jane Elliott in her confronting Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes workshops asks Anglos whether they derive any social power from being white, they invariably scoff at the question, yet all non-whites say they know that being white automatically confers social power because they are on the receiving end of it … and this annoys them greatly. What also annoys them is that Anglos are ignorant of it, deny it, an treat anyone who doesn’t deny it as either irrational or a liar.)

Kind regards.
EM.

You see, you have prejudged me there. Why on earth assume that I won’t give an inch? Of course I’m coming to the discussion with intellectual baggage; but of course I am willing to discard it if it proves to be faulty.

(My ‘deplore’ was in fact about the ban on portraiture. You’ve generalised somewhat.)