One must also take into account that the famous Salman the Persian, a distinguished convert of Muhammad, had to withdraw his desire to marry a daughter of Caliph Omar, because he was a non-Arab. It should be added here that Salman had saved Muhammad and his community, and, Islam, for that matter, in the Battle of the Ditch by giving Muhammad the idea of digging a trench surrounding his community as defence. Muhammad himself had thanked Salman for the saving the day for Islam and praised him and his people for their excellence in knowledge. The social hierarchical system, as recognized by the Quran and Prophet Muhammad (read more here: Racism in Islam: Allah’s White Faces), in which the Koreish were placed at the height of nobility, followed by other Arab tribes, followed by non-Arabs, later on evolved further transforming Islamic societies into a sharply hierarchical social order. Notions of social hierarchy based on birth, clan or race also gradually became incorporated into the corpus of writings of Islamic jurisprudence or fiqh. Taking a spouse from outside one’s kafa’a was sternly frowned upon, if not explicitly forbidden by the fuqaha (jurists). For a non-Arab, marrying an Arab, particularly a woman, became a social crime during the entire age of Islam, continuing to this day in Arab societies. In the Indian subcontinent, the vast majority of Indian Muslims follow the Hanafi law. The opinions of the classical Hanafi scholars regarding kafa’a continued reflect the caste system and social hierarchy. Most Indian Hanafis seem to have regarded caste (biraderi), understood as hereditary occupational group (i.e., division of labour) as an essential factor in deciding kafa’a. It was continued to be determined on consideration of following salient points: (1) legal status as free or enslaved (azadi), (2) economic status (maldari), (3) occupation (pesha), (4) intelligence (‘aql), (5) family origin or ethnicity (nasb), (6) piety (taqwa), and (7) absence of bodily defects. In this way, the caste system was legitimized amongst Muslims of India through the notion of kafa’a: taking a spouse from outside one’s kafa’a was sternly frowned upon, if not explicitly forbidden by the fuqaha. In support of this notion of kafa’a, the ulama used to refer to a hadith according to which caliph ‘Umar refused to let a girl from a rich family to marry a man from a lower class.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 01:54:28 +0000
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