Sadakat Kadri - Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Sharia Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World

Contents

About the Book

This book is important because it is:

Unique . Heaven on Earth offers a critique of extremism that is human rights-based and entertaining combining the comparative approach of Karen Armstrong and the immediacy of Ed Husain ( The Islamist ) with storytelling.

Timely. At a time of veil bans, Quran burnings and English Defence League protests, Kadri voices a liberal view of Islamic history and shows Muslims working against repression. This book explains up-to-the-minute brutalities.

Epic. Interviews, anecdotes, personal reflection and analysis are set against a narrative that sweeps from seventh-century Mecca to the war in Afghanistan. Civilisations are evoked via the vivid lives of caliphs, mystics, and travellers. Legal changes are described through the feuds, courtroom dramas, conquests and cataclysms that have left their mark on modern Islamic law.

First-hand. On the road for five months, Kadri travelled through Iran just before the June 2009 election protests, and took part in a human rights conference there with ayatollahs and academics.

Eye-opening. This book goes beyond the explosive headline issues (criminal justice, women, jihad, religious freedom) to reveal the stranger ones: genie exorcisms; the legal consequences of premature ejaculation; online fatwa advice; the sharia approach to Facebook and Quranic mobile phone ringtones, etc.

Bold. Heaven on Earth primarily targets religious extremism, but also cuts anti-Muslim panic down to size.

About the Author

Half-Finnish and half-Pakistani, Sadakat Kadri was born in London in 1964. He graduated with a first in history and law from Trinity College, Cambridge, and after taking a masters degree at Harvard Law School qualified as a barrister and New York attorney. He has been attached to Londons Doughty Street Chambers since the mid-1990s, and has worked on human rights issues in several overseas jurisdictions, including Turkey and parts of the Middle East. His last book was The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson , he is a past winner of the Spectator /Shiva Naipaul travel writing prize, and before setting off to research the sharia, he wrote a regular column on legal questions for the New Statesman .

Also by Sadakat Kadri

The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson

For my mum and dad, with much love

Prologue: Infinite Justice

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 speciality 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 peoples 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 fathers 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 figures who babbled in the darkness or lunged from wooden posts to which they had been chained, I eventually reached the marble courtyard at the mausoleums centre. 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 tomb-stones. 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 all the while around the hysterics and their helpers. It was hours before the chaos gave way to chirrups, and a semblance of peace returned to the sepulchres.

Walking back to my relatives home across a meadow filled with tottering fourteenth-century funeral vaults, I wondered how to make sense of what had just occurred. I had come to India in search of colour after a year immersed in libraries, but it seemed almost as though I had found too much. A survey of Islamic legal history demands flexibility if it is to entertain rather than anaesthetise, but fitting tales of jinn-exorcism into an account of the sharia called for the literary equivalent of a crowbar until a few hours later. By then, I had found another shrine: a postage stamp of a necropolis, comprising a dusty courtyard, an ancient banyan tree and a chiffon-draped tomb-stone. In the afternoon heat, the otherworldly excitements it might ordinarily have inspired had slowed to a crawl. Two women were gazing at the central slab, motionless beneath their burkas, as though it might shuffle away at any moment. A man stood before the headstone, his palms cupped in prayer, while his young son raced around and kissed other graves at random. The only sign of any transcendental goings-on at all came from a woman who was chanting breathlessly as she strode to and fro beneath the lush branches of the banyan tree, watched by a squatting husband and mournful children. But when I lined up the scene for a photograph, it turned out to contain far more than met the eye. A moustachioed man who was tending a smouldering sheaf of incense sticks at the gnarled roots of the tree raised his hand forbiddingly. No photographs, he ordered. She is making her plea to the king of the jinns.

Throughout the previous night, I had wondered how, precisely, a person possessed by a jinn could expect to obtain relief, and I obediently lowered my camera. The man clearly possessed some kind of authority, for he was selling a selection of holy knick-knacks that were neatly laid out next to the green coverlet of the shrines main tomb, and I decided to strike up a conversation. Using a combination of quizzical gestures and atrocious Urdu, I asked if he had any charms worth taking on the three-month trek to Syria and Istanbul that I had lined up. His first suggestion was an amulet to ward off the evil eye. When I pondered it sceptically, he proffered a leather pouch containing a secret verse of the Quran. It apparently guaranteed good fortune, God willing, so long as the purchaser did not try to read the contents. That seemed a bargain, and as rupees changed hands, I seized the moment. Why no cameras? He nodded solemnly towards the thick cluster of banyan roots and explained that they enthroned the king of the jinns whose court was now in session.

That explained the photography ban in a sense but what, I wondered, was the likely outcome of the womans complaint? The king will listen to both sides and make a ruling, replied the shrines custodian.