Book
Description:
In
the wake of the colossal acts of terrorism of the last decade, the legal
historian and human rights lawyer Sadakat Kadri realized that many people in
the West had ideas about the origins and implications of the shari‘a, or
Islamic law, that were hazy, contradictory, or simply wrong. Even as “shari‘a”
became a loaded word and an all-encompassing explanation, most of us remained
ignorant of its true meaning. And we were doing this at our peril.
In Heaven
on Earth, Kadri brings lucid wit and analytical skill to the thrilling and
turbulent story of Islam’s foundation and expansion. He shows how legal ideas
gradually evolved out of thousands of reports about the Prophet Mohammad, most
of which were not even written down until two centuries after his death. And he
explains how, just in the last forty years, the shari‘a has been appropriated
and transformed by hardliners desperate to impose their oppressive vision. In
the second half of the book, Kadri takes us on an extraordinary journey through
more than half a dozen countries in the Islamic world, where he explores, in
striking detail, how the shari‘a is taught, read, reinterpreted, reverenced,
and challenged—beginning at the eight-hundred-year old Indian grave of his Sufi
mystic ancestor, and ending in Cairo’s City of the Dead, where one of Islam’s
greatest legal scholars still gets daily requests for legal miracles twelve
centuries after his death.
Excerpt
from Heaven on Earth that shows the diversity of Islam:
The
North Indian city of Badaun is barely known beyond the subcontinent, but among
the Muslims of India it has a great reputation. Seven ancient Islamic shrines
encircle the town, collectively drawing visitors from miles around, and one
spiritual specialty has always brought them immense local renown: they are said
to facilitate the exorcism of jinns. That is a weighty claim among the poor,
the credulous, and the desperate. Genies of the region are not popularly
imagined to be the bountiful servants of lamp-rubbing legend. They are
mercurial creatures, capable of wreaking havoc, who routinely seize control of
people’s lives. Victims are suddenly plunged into depression or discontent,
possessed of unusual ideas, and urged to speak, to lash out, even sometimes to
kill. Entire families suffer as a consequence, and dozens are therefore to be
found at the largest of the shrines, where they camp out in a shanty-filled
cemetery pending miraculous interventions on behalf of their afflicted
relatives. The scene is permanently alive, serviced by a nearby market, and it
swells into something of a carnival as day-trippers arrive by the hundreds on
the eve of Friday prayers. The spectacle had horrified and fascinated me in
roughly equal measure ever since I first visited Badaun—my father’s birthplace—in
1979, at the age of fifteen. Elderly relations had warned me then to steer well
clear of the place after dark on a Thursday night. In the spring of 2009, I
finally got round to disobeying them.
I
reached the shrine long after dusk, and its neem tree glades were pulsating to
the drums and accordions of an ululating troupe of musicians. Picking my way
through knots of pilgrims, past shadowy gures who babbled in the darkness or
lunged from wooden posts to which they had been chained, I eventually reached
the marble courtyard at the mausoleum’s center. The everyday bedlam of India
looked to have merged with a scene from The Crucible. In a moonlight that
was fluorescent, bright-eyed girls were whipping their hair into propellers
while
older folk, senile or despondent, chattered to tombstones. As I fidgeted
with my camera settings, a teenage girl next to me stepped forward, assisted by
anxious relatives, to quiver and collapse into the waiting arms of two shrine
employees. Others strode forward to swoon in their turn, and were expertly
scooped aside to make way for fresh fainters. Whooping children, barely able to
believe their luck, cartwheeled around the hysterics and their helpers
throughout. It was hours before the chaos gave way to chirrups and a semblance
of peace returned to the sepulchers.
To read an excellent interview with Sadakat Kadri, author of Heaven on Earth, click here.
