Response to Ingrid Mattson's What’s Up With Muslims & Dogs?

Introduction by Mufti Ebrahim Desai (may Allah have mercy on him):

The article in question:




A boil that erupts on the foot does not necessarily mean that one has to rush of to the podiatrist. It could be indicative of a serious imbalance in the blood, which is likely to affect the whole body. When I received a copy of an article entitled “What's Up With Muslims and Dogs?”^[2] by Ingrid Mattson, I could not help discern the underlying hidden malady that incidentally manifested itself through the topic of Muslims keeping dogs in the home. The brief column is a good example of the common ailment of apologetics coupled with pseudo-scholastics.

The unique feature of traditional Islamic learning is the continuous chain of authorization. A genuine Islamic scholar is tutored for a considerable period under the feet of a master until such time that he/she receives Ijazah (authorization). The teacher himself or herself must have been similarly authorized. The uninterrupted and verifiable chain of reliable transmitters eventually links up directly with the Messenger of Allah (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). It is this unparalleled feature that sets traditional Ulama apart from self styled scholars of Islam. Therefore the following maxim has been repeatedly echoed over the past fourteen centuries:
The column is a stark example of personal confusion passed off as Islamic academics, supposedly representing the correct position of the religious texts.

The writer attempts to transpose the prohibition of keeping dogs in the home from the religious source to a social misunderstanding. It is after all, she argues, just a cultural thing, and has been ignorantly attributed to the Islamic religious texts. In an attempt to urge the reader to “back off from the religious argument”, she endeavours to re-interpret the texts. Herein lies the fundamental flaw of her reasoning. No matter how one interprets the religious texts, it is nonetheless an interpretation of religion, which cannot be relabelled as culture. It remains religious, whether or not we agree with such an interpretation.

In order to bolster her theory, she raises the question of the status of dog’s saliva. However, the topic under question was whether the prohibition of keeping dogs in the home is based on Islam or culture. The impurity or otherwise of dog’s saliva is merely one factor that could influence the real question. There are other reasons why Islam has prohibited the keeping of dogs in the home, as will be elucidated below. Zooming in on the matter to saliva conveniently obscures the topic’s broader religious angle.

The writer narrows the topic to the dog’s saliva. What she does not tell us is that there are different views within the Maliki school, one being that the saliva is impure. Even if we accept the view within the Maliki school that the saliva is not impure, how do we explain the fact that according to all the Ulama (scholars) within the Maliki school the keeping of dogs as pets is reprehensible. According to the majority of schools, all the dog’s body fluids, including sweat, are impure. Two of the four juristic schools view the hair that falls of the dog as impure as well. Muslims’ concern about the purity of their body, clothes and immediate environment can hardly be termed as something cultural. It is precisely a religious issue. This belies the writer’s vociferation that Muslims need to back off from the religious argument.

Very strangely, the impurity issue is sort to be downplayed by the ridiculous proposition that those with children at home have impurity all over the place, and they still manage to live with it. I don’t know whether this is a cultural thing or not. Maybe in the ‘All American Muslim’ culture homes with children have impurities spread all over the place. Where I come from, certainly this is the furthest from the truth. The same goes for the majority of Muslims in the world. Yes, with young children there is the occasional mishap which is attended to. Otherwise, the purity within the Muslim is always maintained.

The writer is then compelled to address the reality that the issue of keeping dogs within the home transcends beyond the issue of impurity. It has a spiritual dimension. The Messenger of Allah (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) has said:
In another Hadith (Prophetic saying) Qirat is described as the reward equivalent to Mount Uhud, a huge mountain outside of Madinah Munawwarah.

Yet another Hadith states:
In an attempt to diminish the significance of the Hadith, the writer begins with “If a Muslim accepts this report as authentic…”. She suggests that it is a question of personal preference for Muslims to choose certain reports and reject others. In fact the very thread and theme of her article is premised on the approach that she first has her ad hominem view on dogs, and then goes cherry picking to the religious texts to suit her own personal conclusions. Anything that comes in the way is re-interpreted or explained away to suit her objectives. This narration appears in the following books of Hadith compilation: Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, Nasa’i, Ibn Majah, Ibn Hibban, Bayhaqi, Hakim, Tabrani, Ahmad, etc. It has been accepted as authentic by the authorities in the field of Hadith, and therefore there is no “if” that applies here.

The ludicrousness intensifies when the writer suggests that since we cannot receive revelation, this Hadith does not apply to us. The following quotation from Allamah Dimyari succinctly addresses this point.
Some angels are also deputed to inspire good thoughts into the hearts of Muslims.

If the only function of angels was to convey revelation, then the Hadith would be, in the estimation of the writer, absurd. It would imply that the Messenger of Allah (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) is discouraging his followers from the impossible, which is nonsensical. It is preferred that we dismiss the writer as non compos mentis than rather even remotely attributing absurdity to the Messenger of Allah (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam).

The writer then resorts to the oldest trick used by modernists, the fallacious not-found-in-the-Qur’an argument. She postulates that since there is no negative mention of dogs in the Qur’an, therefore it is not a religious issue but a cultural one. Like one cannot expect the Constitution of a State to include every law and rule, similarly the Qur’an does not contain every fine detail. It lays out the principles. In numerous verses we are instructed to follow the Messenger of Allah (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), and that is our second source of the detailed laws.

If we had to follow the not-found-in-the-Qur’an argument, we would not be able to carry out our most basic religious duties. Where in the Qur’an does it say that we have to perform the midday prayer, at what time, and how many rak’at (units of prayer)? The Qur’an does not tell us how much Zakat (compulsory charity) should be discharged. The list can go on infinitely. What the Qur’an instructs us to do is to follow the Messenger of Allah (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). For Muslims, therein is our guidance, and it is here that we locate our attitude towards keeping dogs in the home, not in our culture.

The writer then resorts to utter drivel in order to dramatise her cultural thing hypothesis. She says:
After acknowledging that there are Prophetic reports on the topic, she still wishes to locate the source in culture and not religion. As Muslim communities urbanised, they had a few run-ins with dogs, which resulted in fear and negativity. This then germinated into “confused religious reasoning”. The poor lady is the one who is really confused.

She accepts that there are valid concerns around the purity related to dogs. Muslims are overtly concerned about issues of purity as it is a prerequisite of prayer. She then shifts the entire scenario and implies that it was solely a case of human experience. As if, so to say, there was no religious position on dogs. There existed a pure vacuum. In this vacuum, Muslims of the past had some negative experiences with dogs. The poor souls were in search for some basis on which to shun dogs. They therefore invented a religious dimension in order to give some force to their own negative human experiences. In other words, the religious dimension is a fabrication of the mind, it is a myth and an invention to pacify human fears. The implication is that the Prophetic reports are something invented by Muslims to give credence to their inner negativity. Concerns around purity are fictions introduced by the jurists. They do not really exist. Those who attribute a religious dimension to the topic do so since they are confused.

The absurdity of her hypothesis is self manifest and does not require an in-depth analysis.

As alluded to above, the discussion goes deeper than the mere issue of dogs. The ruptures generated by this type of article penetrate far beyond the surface, and have the potential of damaging a Muslim’s faith. Those brought up in Muslim homes have learnt Islam through observation. Islamic norms and practices were imbibed through experiencing practical Islam. A relatively small fraction of Islamic awareness is attributable to formal Islamic education. Such Muslim have accepted and placed faith in the generally accepted norms and practices of the religious communities in which they were brought up. The overwhelming majority of Muslims would have learnt through experience that Muslims do not, for religious reasons, keep dogs at home. They had hitherto absolute confidence in the general attitude of their religious communities.

Somebody now comes along and claims that the entire Muslim communities were wrong, were all relying on “confused religious reasoning” and were in error in giving it a religious connotation. In reality it was a cultural thing. Muslims were for over a millennium confused and without guidance. In this enlightened age we are able to trace the real source of their attitudes. It is only now in the 15th Hijri century that we are truly guided and realised the colossal error. With a few more debates of this nature on relatively minor issues, the confidence this Muslim has in his experience of Islam through observation is shattered. His whole community has been proven wrong, and his entire Islamic experience has now been rendered spurious. The issue may be minor – the keeping of dogs – but the implications are catastrophic. My entire Muslim community, including the learned, were ignorant and mislead. We had all along taken such norms and practices for granted. From now on, nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is up for debate, even the most accepted of norms. We need to rethink the whole of Islam as we know it. It is this shattering of confidence and faith that is the most destructive consequence of this exercise aimed at reinventing Islam.

This is not to say that all communal experience must be taken to correctly represent Islam. There are certain cultural practices that have been confused with Islam. However, in this discussion we are dealing with a norm that is universal. Wherever one goes one would experience practicing Muslims abstaining from keeping dogs in the home. The writer now wishes to reverse a fourteen century old position in order to suit her whims.

It is a reality that some Muslims drink liquor, commit adultery, sodomise or abandon the compulsory prayers. As long as they accept these misdeeds to be their own personal weakness, there is hope of repentance and reformation. Salvation is dependent on acknowledgement of our weaknesses. To some degree or the other we all sin. What is frightening is the recent trend of justifying our sins and weaknesses. Islam is being re-interpreted to suit our own fancies. Guilt is pacified by the re-invention of Islam. Herein lies our self destruction. May Allah Ta’ala save one and all.

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[1] An Islamic scholar and Mufti (juriconsult) from Durban, South Africa. For more information, see here: nationalbarcouncil.co.za/members?id=37

[2] www.huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-mattson/whats-up-with-muslims-and_b_1144819.html

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Taken from HERE