Prof Maqari Isn’t the Problem. The Androcentric Fatwa Is -By Abdulkadir Salaudeen

A few days ago, the northern Nigerian cyberspace was buzzing, and still buzzing, because of a fatwa issued by Professor Ibrahim Ahmad Maqari, one of the Imams of the National Mosque in Abuja.

For clarity, a fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion given by a jurist on a matter of Islamic jurisprudence. Before I discuss the issue itself, here is a question: Is Maqari qualified to issue a fatwa?

It is difficult to get an objective answer because of sectarianism and emotionalism. Some will argue that he is a professor of Arabic and should know his limits on religious rulings. Others will argue that he is an Islamic scholar whose scholarship is top-notch and even envied by his peers.

The sect you belong to — Sufism, Sunnism, or Salafism — will most likely determine how you answer the question, rather than any sense of objectivity.

Is Maqari a qualified jurist to give fatwa? I am not interested in that debate. I am more interested in the fatwa he gave and in how people reacted to it.

Maqari was asked whether “temporary marriage” is permissible. This should not be confused with Mut’ah, the temporary marriage practiced by Shiites as part of their religion, where both bride and groom are aware of the temporariness.

The “temporary marriage” in question is a marriage entered with the intention of divorce at a future, unstated time. The husband-to-be keeps this intention hidden during the solemnization. The bride is neither informed, nor her guardians.

To illustrate, scholars who permit this arrangement cite the case of a married man who travels abroad for six months, a year, or two years for study or business or for other legitimate reasons. For fear of committing adultery due to his inability to control his desires, he may marry another woman with the intention of divorcing her when his stay abroad ends.

This is the fatwa for which Maqari is being severely criticized. But the fatwa is not originally his. He was not exercising personal ijtihad (independent legal reasoning). So the question of whether he is a jurist is beside the point. He claimed that some Sunni scholars gave this legal opinion in the past. Maqari is right to attribute it to earlier scholars, even though he did not name them.

I have two major concerns. One is with the fatwa itself. The other is with those attacking Maqari as ignorant and incoherent, and describing him with unprintable adjectives.

As I noted earlier, this topic is not new. Scholars from the four major schools discussed temporary marriage. Some approved it, and many declared it unlawful and deceptive.

If Maqari is ignorant for what he said, according to those attacking him, then scholars who said it before him must be more ignorant. On that long list we find highly respected ulama such as Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Qudamah, and, recently, Ibn Baz. Critics of Maqari should be fair and bold enough to also criticize other prominent scholars who held the same view. Failure to do so is hypocritical. It is selective outrage, dishonest scholarship, and a disgrace to learning.

If the attack comes from scholars, they should be ashamed. If it comes from blind followers who think any scholar outside their sect must always be wrong, then they need education. Rigorous learning, wide reading, and research will show them that truth and wisdom can be found anywhere, even among those we disagree with. No individual, group, or sect has a monopoly on truth. Seekers of wisdom take it wherever they find it.

Therefore, Maqari is not the problem. He said nothing new. The problem is androcentrism that has crept into the thinking and tradition of our scholars from the classical era to the present.

There are many androcentric fatwas and interpretations in classical Islamic literature. But because many modern scholars blindly follow the salaf without questioning or critique, they accept everything they read from the predecessors hook, line, and sinker.

I hope my Salafi friends will now understand why I say I do not follow the salaf robotically, I follow the Qur’an and the Sunnah. Salafism is not a monolithic body of thought where all views are codified. What made sense in their age may not make sense in ours. The ultimate arbiter is the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and no group has a monopoly on their interpretation.

For readers unfamiliar with the term, androcentrism means male-centered. My dictionary defines it as “an ideological focus on males and men, and on issues affecting them, possibly to the detriment of non-males.”

In simple terms, it is when male experiences and male perspectives are treated as the normal or default way to view the world. The experiences of women and others are treated as secondary.

An attempt to prevent immorality through an androcentric lens is what produced this fatwa and many similar ones. To be fair to those scholars, and to Maqari, it was an honest attempt to curb immorality. But because they focused on men, they gave little thought to the consequences for women.

Because the lens is male-centered, they even invoked the jurisprudential principle of choosing the lesser of two evils to justify temporary marriage for men, as an alternative to fornication or adultery.

To distinguish it from Shiite Mut’ah, they stipulated that a man must not inform the woman he proposes to marry that he intends to divorce her later, for example after four months.

If Shiite Mut’ah is condemned by Sunnis for encouraging promiscuity, is this hidden temporary marriage not worse? Like Mut’ah, it encourages men to be promiscuous. Worse than Mut’ah, it institutionalizes deception of women by men.

This is where I disagree with Maqari’s justification. According to him, it is an act of piety for a man to marry with the intention of divorce in order to avoid adultery in foreign land where he is alone without his family. While the entire practice of temporary marriage is baseless, nonsense, and without evidence, to call it piety under any circumstance is ridiculously selfish.

It is deception. The mother of all deceptions of women by men. It is far from piety and righteousness. It is the antithesis of religious sanity. Hidden intention to divorce a woman after marriage is the very definition of moral decadence of men — the very definition of cruelty and wickedness against women. Such a man should not be counted among the believers. This is what the Prophet ﷺ meant when he said: “Whoever cheats us is not among us.”

Those who issued that fatwa are chronic androcentrists. The fatwa itself is utterly androcentric. There is no consideration of the harm it causes women.

By the logic of temporary marriage, women would become chattels. They would become items to be acquired and discarded at will, after being used. They would be expirable and have an expiry date in the hands of men. They would be subject to deception, and that deception would be called piety in the name of religion.

Women would become sexual objects to satisfy male desire and hedonism. If temporary marriage became common, it would make a mockery of the marriage institution and erode all the values at its core. Family life would suffer, come close to collapse, and eventually fail.

In such a system, sex workers would appear more dignified than noble women. While sex workers are paid for their service and suffer no deception, even though it is illegal, noble women would be used and dumped, and left with the trauma of being jilted by men they loved.

In that world, a woman’s love would be treated as naivety, if not a crime. Women would not only develop a phobia of men, they would develop hatred for men. In gender terms, they would become incurably misandrous.

These are few implications of Maqari’s temporary marriage, and of the scholars before him. There are many other implications this column does not mention.

Rather than crucify Maqari, let us crucify androcentrism. In interpreting religious texts, our scholars must abandon the androcentric lens. They must discard it. It is dangerous. It is against the spirit of Islam. They should embrace a humanistic lens. That is Islam. The true Islam, where women are seen as human beings like men.

Women are now asking Maqari and those who think like him: “Can women also marry with the intention of seeking divorce?” That question opens a can of worms.
Wallahul Musta’an.

Abdulkadir Salaudeen
salahuddeenabdulkadir@gmail.com