After Democracy and Nation-states, do we now need to adopt religious rituals too?

One 29th November 2008, Irfan Husain wrote a column published in Daily Dawn which can be accessed at http://www.dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn%20Content%20Library/dawn/the-paper/columnists/is+yoga+bad+for+you. The article is written in response to a Malaysian scholar’s fatwa (religious edict) that ‘yoga’ should be prohibited for Muslims. Abdul Shukor Husin, the chairman of Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council issued a fatwa in which he considers the spiritual elements of yoga to be in contradiction with Islam. He is of the opinion that merely doing the physical movements of yoga minus the worshipping and chanting might not be wrong in the eyes of the religion; it should be avoided as “doing one would lead to another”. He said yoga has been practiced by the Hindu community for thousands of years and incorporates physical and religious elements and chants and worshipping, with the aim at “being one with God”. He further told a press conference that, “We discourage Muslims to do yoga as a form of exercise because it will ultimately lead to religious worshipping and chanting which is against Islam. In Islam, one must not do things which can erode one’s aqidah or faith. Doing yoga, even just the physical movements is a step towards an erosion of one’s faith in the religion, hence Muslims should avoid it”.

The fatwa, though well articulated, caused a fuss in the International media a day after it appeared on the 21st of November 2008. In a week’s time our intellectuals also found it worthy to shed some ink on the matter. Irfan Husain’s article discusses the fatwa, but neither from a religious point of view nor from a spiritual one. Rather, it starts with a personal anecdote which is meant to establish the medical benefits of yoga, as if the scholars have denied any of them, or as if these benefits can be acquired exclusively through yoga. The article further makes fun of another fatwa by the same council, in which it prohibits women to imitate men in dress and behavior. Here again, the author brings another anecdote, that of his childhood cousin who according to him is perfectly feminine even after having a boyish past while a kid.
Though the author admits that he is unqualified to challenge these fatawah, this doesn’t hinder him from doing so. As the author doesn’t even bother to discuss how, the process and which evidences from Quran and Sunnah the scholars used to issue the edicts, I will not focus on the fatwa itself. However, it is still worthwhile mentioning here that both the fatawah, whether someone agrees or disagrees, are well grounded in Quran and Sunnah as there are daleel for both. The first fatwa is firstly based on the sharai principle that anything leading to haram becomes itself haram. This is applicable to yoga, because one could start for the physical part of it, but easily get involved into its unalienable spiritual component. Secondly, as yoga is something that emanates from another religion, the general Islamic principle is the prohibition to imitate or adopt such rituals. For the case of women dressing and behaving like men, there is an explicit hadith which forbids that. Without going into further detail, this should suffice just to show that the scholars were not basing their fatawah on their whims or personal experiences. Therefore, anyone attempting to question their validity should also engage in sincere and serious debate within the same parameters of daleel and reason based on the sharai framework. This brings me to my first objection on this article namely, would the author challenge some new research appearing in a medical journal about a disease by quoting his larger family’s experiences with that very disease? Of course not, because to counter such a scientific study, we all (including the author) recognize the need to bring even stronger evidences, within the given scientific framework. Likewise, the scientific and wider community would have mocked such a shallow and insulting effort. This does beg the question why the wider Muslim community is so silent about these and similar articles on matters that require robust Islamic discourse and not anecdotal shallow commentary.

My second objection is related to the author’s playing with semantics. Is he too naïve to know that the term yoga refers to a composite set of actions and ideas which have a specific origin and context attached to it? I would take it that before going to his yoga classes he didn’t bother to look up the meaning of yoga in a simple English dictionary, but did he also not do so before writing this article? Does he seriously believe that a practicing Hindu, Christian or Jew would take up the Muslim prayer (Salah) as an exercise for the body and soul because of its physical component? Did he overlook that the fatwa on boyish dressing and behavior was for adult girls and not minors, or does he deliberately mislead the unwary reader by mentioning his minor cousin? Is he truly convinced that ‘goodness’ and ‘fun’ can be criteria for measuring the correctness of a fatwa? Is he convinced that anything not explicitly mentioned in the Quran is permitted? Does he really think that modernity is by adopting new ‘ideas’ even those attached to a different creed (and contradicting his own) and because he is afraid of us going back to the backwardness of the 6th century? Is he sure that confronting the ‘half baked mullahs’ would result in something constructive if done in such an unqualified and erratic way?

To many, yoga might seem an issue not worthwhile discussing, at least not with such seriousness. The point is that the issue here is not yoga, rather it’s firstly the fact that our intellectuals, by pointing out Islamic opinions on such issues and dealing with them without due diligence, are doing no service to either Islam or intellectual discourse. The second point falls from the first, that exactly due to such an attitude we have today accepted concepts, solutions and systems which are in no way reconcilable with Islam and contradict it in their origin and purpose. Two examples of such conepts adopted by Muslims on equally shallow argumentation are that of deomcracy and nation-states. Of course both of them deserve seperate treatment in dedicated posts.

Given all these points, I really wonder why this article was written in first place. It might be that some of us have started fearing Islam so much that anything uttered in the name of it is simply rejected and ridiculed. Is it that our intellectuals seek the praise, recognition and acceptance of others and feel the need to appease them at all costs? If yes, giving them the benefit of doubt, I think one explanation for this behavior could be that they have never seen Islam implemented in its totality on a people rather what they saw is and was bits and pieces of it, mostly adopted either to silence the masses in their calls for Islam or because it was convenient at that time to the ruler implementing those patches. Clearly the colonial occupation was not merely of the lands physically, but of the people intellectually, and bringing forward correct ideas is the only cure for this intellectual slavery.