There are perfectly sincere ways of mitigating the punishments: Ijtihad, or independent judgment, applied to maslaha, that which is beneficial, permits judges to choose the interpretation most conducive to human welfare. Using these principles, it became possible for reformers to argue that it would be just to cut off a thief's hand only in a society in which he did not have to steal in order to live. Similarly, it is surely not beneficial for the emotional health of a society for crowds to gloat over gory public choppings, whippings or beheadings.
There is a surprising degree of flexibility in Islam's system of moral judgments. The system is not one of black and white, of simple right and wrong. By Islamic custom, there are five categories of actions: the obligatory, the approved, the neutral, the disapproved and the prohibited. Doubtless the militant Muslims would not accept these realistic gradations. In all religions the zealots, those harking back to what they consider a state of past purity, seem to find it necessary to buttress their renewal of faith with negative proscriptions. Hence, perhaps, the importance given by Christian fundamentalists to such proscriptions.
For the Muslim the one and only source of guidance is the revelation of the Koran, and it is noteworthy that the legal provisions it lays down are only about a tenth of the whole. As well as the Koran there is the Hadith, the traditions of the acts and the non-revealed sayings of the Prophet, which were manufactured by the hundred thousand. Even after severe sifting, the "authoritative" collections of Hadith made by scholars contain several thousand examples, of which perhaps a few score may be accepted as authentic. In any case, authentic or not, no Hadith had scriptural sanction, which is why one Hadith has Muhammed saying, "Take from me only the Koran."
What, according to the Koran are the essentials of Islamic belief and behaviour? There are five pillars of Islam. First is the affirmation of the faith, the Shehadah, in the words, "There is no God but God and Muhammed is his prophet". Then there are the five daily prayers, and the fasting during daylight hours during the month of Ramadan. Numbers four and five are the Haj pilgrimage to the shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca and to the valley of Arafat outside Mecca, and the payment of the tax called zakat. Of these the shehadah is essential, for without making that affirmation no person can be a Muslim. But having made that affirmation, nobody can say, and only God can know, whether a person is or is not a Muslim.
Many Muslim reformers, looking for the inward spirituality of the faith, have said that the only permanent and indispensable factors in Islamic belief are the shehadah, the daily prayers and the Ramadan fast. Not the robes, not the turban or the veil, not the beard, not the Arab names, not the cruel punishments. Only those actions that are a product of a believer's direct, face-to-face relationship with the one and only God are essential: those that refer to relationships between people are not. In a revealing and damning statement of the militants' upside-down view, the Muslim zealots in Egypt denounced those for whom "prayer, the fast and the pilgrimage are all there is to Islam". They claimed it must also include the application of sharia Islamic law on divorce, alcohol, criminal punishments and so on.
In the Prophet's lifetime only three prayers a day were stipulated, a number later increased to five. Today three prayers a day is considered incomplete but acceptable. And while Muhammed gave importance to communal prayers in the mosque, especially those at midday on
(article accompanied by photograph of crowd of protesters, captioned:
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