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Pornography and the Shariah: Why must things be banned in society?

Answered as per Hanafi Fiqh by Qibla.com

Answered by Shaykh Gibril F Haddad

Dear Sir, I’m a South African working in London and have the pleasure of working with a Muslim colleague. We’ve been discussing various issues about religion and Islam. My view is that people should be free to choose their own way of life, the only condition being that they do not hurt or offend anyone else.

In our discussion, the topic of pornography came up and my colleague says ideally pornography should be banned. I personally find all porn repulsive but nonetheless feel that people should be allowed to make their own decisions and suffer their own consequences. If people choose to watch porn is it not their decision to make? How does it affect anyone else, as no one is forcing porn actors to do it, they choose to defile themselves. By banning things does this not remove a persons freedom of choice? I believe religion should be an individual choice and that no law or society should `police’ people’s lives. According to my colleague, Shariah law says pornography should be banned, and as I’ve said this prevents people making their own choice. Surely faith should be strong enough that things need not be banned but because people choose not to indulge in them because faith makes them strong enough to resist. I am not very religious but choose to have nothing to do with porn because I find it revolting. By having to resort to banning things is Islam not implying that it’s lost the battle of hearts and therefore has to resort to policing in order to help society?

In addition, should Shariah law apply to everybody (not just with respect to porn, but also with things such as alcohol consumption, female dress code, etc.) including non-Muslims like myself?

Answer:
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

Dear Sir,

Muslims and the Shari`a agree with you that “people should be allowed to make their own decisions and suffer their own consequences.” This is, after all, the basis of freewill + accountability pre-conditional to our moral system together with that of the other two Abrahamic dispensations. And yet the West rightly does not allow individuals to make their own decisions regarding the life and death of oneself and others. Suicide and murder are illegal because they are deemed unacceptable infringements upon the rights of others even if they can be conceived as (misguided) exercises of individual rights. As Aristotle said in the beginning of his book of Ethics, knowing how to commit a crime well is not considered a science at all.

Islam possesses the most heightened sense of this balance between the rights of the individual and those of the society. Thus the domain in which the individual roams free and is accountable, does not encroach upon the domain of the societal mores with its own criteria of decency, order, beauty, mental health, and so forth. So if it is good for one or more individuals to cut down trees and  build tall cement structures, malls, and parking lots, for example, society also has the right to demand green space, playgrounds, and  healthy building material for people to live in, even if it curtails those individuals’ right to profit or, as you eloquently said, “the only condition being that they do not hurt or offend anyone else.”

It is the same with the control of the high-profit industries whose sole benefit is to indulge the lusts: alcohol and tobacco, drugs, gambling and prostitution, pornography. We may notice that (i) they all go together and (ii) are run mostly by the criminal element of  society known as “organized crime” families. With regard to tobacco,  Muslim authorities and societies have by and large thrown in the  towel. It is truly a pandemic running amok in the Muslim world  despite the valiant efforts of some of the Ulema to prohibit it.  With regard to alcohol, drugs and gambling the prohibition is much stronger as it has the word of the Qur’an as its basis.

With regard to prostitution it is widespread but kept out of sight except in certain Gulf mini-States whose rulers fear not Allah nor the Day of Judgment, and whose subjects are like cattle or dumber.

With regard to pornography it is an on-going battle in the Muslim world slavishly panting after its “Sexual Revolution” beginnings  in the West in the Sixties, which culminated with the Supreme Court decisions in the US in the Nineties first banning, then giving up  on banning pornography in the name of individual liberties – and damning the liberties of society and the family to hell.

We may call the nature of control a lid of public decency. As  long as these activities remain clandestine they remain shameful but if they are allowed to mix with broad daylight all shame is lost. For example, the Sultanate of Brunei has the words “Death for all drug traffickers under Brunei Law” written on every immigration landing form but turns a blind eye to cross-dressing on the street corners of its capital at night, as I was stupefied to find out during a late night drive through Bandar Seri Begawan.

The battle is not without hope in the Islamic world because there is still a deep-seated sense of shame and decency in individuals and their societies. There is also a deep-seated sense in most those countries if not all of them, that Religion is not a matter of individual choice and practice but a lifestyle that englobes the collective in all possible senses of the word: psychologically, historically, culturally, politically, legally. It is, to say the least, difficult for a Westerner to understand this unless he has lived in the East for a while and drunk in those values that  otherwise remain an anachronism if he is kind, and an affront to  his modernity if he were, like his modernity, born yesterday.

As to the important Question, “should Sharia law apply to everybody (not just with respect to porn, but also with things such as alcohol consumption, female dress code, etc.) including non-Muslims like  myself,” as a theoretical Question the answer is yes, the Shari`a is ideally quite Spartan with respect to those issues, somewhat like Singapore or Switzerland with respect to public cleanliness, traffic, and other issues of societal rights. However, in practice, these things are treated with leeway in all Muslim countries including the most puritanical, as long as one indulges them out of sight and does not undress, imbibe, or fornicate ostensively.

Otherwise, it is really not an infringement on individual liberty nor a defeat of the battle for hearts to expect the man in the street to respect the public norms of decency in every culture. As you said, “people should be free to choose their own way of life, the only  condition being that they do not hurt or offend anyone else.” The hubris of globalization is to try by all means to violate those norms in the name of “freedom” when we know that the real reason is money.

Hajj Gibril
 

This answer was indexed from Qibla.com, which used to have a repository of Islamic Q&A answered by various scholars. The website is no longer in existence. It has now been transformed into a learning portal with paid Islamic course offering under the brand of Kiflayn.

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