Quite a number of hadith exist to try and pin down the revelation of a specific ayah or surah to a distinct occasion within Muhammad’s biography. Often not much gets added by this, and indeed sometimes the connection of the circumstance to the ayah is laughable. But there is a circumstance behind the revelation of Surah al-Aḥzab, “The Militia,” and not one that you need to go to the hadith to find. Muhammad has married his adopted son’s ex-wife. This is a completed event, something that has already happened, and the Quran is now speaking up on the issues raised by the marriage. We have already dealt with how this surah has redefined relationships of adoption and incest. Today we’ll look at the event itself.
Continue reading “Surah 33: The Militia, Part 3”Tag: incest
Surah 33: The Militia, Part 2
The following conversations about the structure and limits of family in the Quran are going to be hard for Americans to process. Here in America, our definitions of family have become increasingly… fluid? Sentimental? We have less reverence for blood ties and blood obligations than has been historically true of perhaps of any other civilization in favor of reverence for “the family you choose.” And yet with our widened definitions of “family” we’ve also retained a pretty traditional sense and sentiment towards incest. In a mainstream culture where sex is treated as more interpersonal-intimacy or sport, and only optionally reproductive, the reaction to incest is still:
Our bounds for incest aren’t particularly defined, really. We think it’s all about the genetics and the hazards this wreaks upon our progeny as revealed to us by modern science, but that’s a reductionist definition of our actual approach. It’s still taboo to marry a step-relative or an in-law, even though that constitutes no genetic hazard. Maybe in a hyper-sexualized world, our revulsion to incest derives from a desire to just have a sphere of people who are not an option sexually, and in our priority of emotionally-tied families that extends to types of relationships, whether the genetic hazard is there or not.
And in the face of that kind of emotion-driven definition of family and incest the Quran draws some hard lines. It is not more purely objective in definition (as regards what the basic point of incest is), but it is concrete in articulation. Combine it with some relevant ayat from previous suwar we have read, and what lines are drawn in the Islamic family?
Continue reading “Surah 33: The Militia, Part 2”
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