Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

GOD’ S WAY t 185
rant in the Quran itself, and yet there are sound hadith that seem
to prescribe it for both men and women. The Muslim consensus
decided early on that male circumcision was indeed an obligation,
whereas there was no general agreement on the matter of female
circumcision, which is, consequently, practiced by some Muslims,
ignored by others, and decried by still others.
Consensus is clearly mutable, though such changes occur slowly
and only with difficulty. The arguments for change take the traditional
form of a debate over the “true” and hence “only” interpretation
of quranic passages that are often opaque and occasionally
contradicted (or “canceled”) by others, or of summoning
up hadith that appear to resist the current consensus. What has
changed is not the evidence but moral sensibilities: they drive the
attempt to change the consensus, just as another set of moral sensibilities
shaped it in the first place. Where an earlier generation of
Muslims preferred to veil its women and make divorce solely a
male prerogative, some more recent Muslims prefer women to be
unveiled and to make the initiation of divorce a right of both members
to the marriage contract. Both groups resort to quranic exegesis
and hadith citation to support their preferences; what distinguishes
the more modern arguments is the often unacknowledged
presumption of historical conditioning.