How Islam Settled Roe v. Wade Centuries Ago

As soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, familiar — and troubling — Islamophobic tropes began to emerge in the discourse.

“America’s Taliban really hates women and minorities,” wrote Daily Beast editor Naveed Jamali on Twitter, harkening back to late September when dozens of commentators, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, started referring to Texas lawmakers as the “American Taliban” — a trope that Muslim leaders are still trying to come back from.

Meanwhile, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah gave it his own comedic twist: “All across the country, women in places like Missouri or even Texas will have the same abortion rights as women under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Think about it. We just evacuated people out of Afghanistan, and now we are going to evacuate them out of Tennessee?” he quipped — up until this point walking the fine line between humor and accidental Islamophobia. “After all these years of the right screaming about Shariah law, it turns out they were just jealous.”

Never mind the fact that this comparison is insulting to Muslims — it is also blatantly false. Rather than point out the hypocrisy of the way that the far right has spent the past 20 years criticizing the Taliban for its record on women’s rights only to turn around and enact its own brand of religious fundamentalism, this commentary misses the mark and lands as a lazy insult, akin to “you crazies are even crazier than those brown crazies!” It unwittingly drags Muslims into the so-called “culture wars,” hurling them into the fray of the right wing’s crackdown on LGBTQ and women’s rights, their faith no more than an argument to prove a point.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Muslims have had their faith exploited as a political pawn in bipartisan politics. Sometimes it is left-leaning Democrats who uphold them as an underrepresented minority in a sea of white supremacy, all the while refusing to take account of their faith and values that might not as cleanly line up with their agenda. Other times, it is the Christian far right that superimposes its conservative viewpoints onto them as fellow people of faith, assuming their faith-based politics will align.

Some conservatives are taking the bait. Jordan Peterson, who is openly suspicious of modern science, also conveniently believes that the truth and wisdom found in religion are the guidance that lost young men need in the world. He believes this so much that he has even defended anti-democratic, Salafi preachers. Other Muslims — even some scholars — have adopted the extreme far right stance that abortion is the equivalent of murder.

Ironically, these views could not be further than the actual Islamic views on abortion—which are extremely diverse, and historically a subject of constant debate and consideration across schools of thought, from fringe Islamic jurists to the mainstays of Sunni and Shia scholarship. Often it is considered from both a religious and practical standpoint — guided by the hadith (the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and acts) but also informed by someone’s ability to give birth, and any complications that a pregnant woman might face. It is hotly debated — but it is the presence of this debate — and the breadth of nuance among different schools of thought — that makes it so different from the polarizing forces of the U.S. culture wars that is driving the debate to the brink of absolutism.

If Muslims are going to get dragged into this particular front of America’s culture wars, it is time to set the record straight. There is no debate today in Muslim-majority countries about the permissibility of abortion when the mother’s health is in jeopardy, which means that abortion remains an integral and noncontroversial part of women’s health. Modern states may grapple with social and moral dilemmas when the abortion is elective, but there is a rich tradition of Islamic law to draw on that has addressed many of the questions with which the U.S. Supreme Court is grappling.

https://newlinesmag.com/essays/how-islam-settled-roe-v-wade-centuries-ago/