A thought exercise......

[patgund]

Looking at the panel listings for Conjecture, and saw "Islam in Speculative Fiction - From Dune to the Terrorists of Irustan, how have SF/F depictions of Islam changed through the years?"

This got me to thinking seriously about Islam in SF and the future.

Okay, you have a colony ship that's going to take 500+ years to get to a new star system, and it's a one-way trip. Let's argue it's a sleeper ship rather than a generation ship.

The colonalists are all Muslim.

They get to the planet. Now what??

What direction do they face?
How can they cope with the fact that they - or their decendants, can't make the Hajj to Mecca that all Muslims must make during their lives?
How do you know when times for prayer are?
When do you know when Ramadan begins when the moon you need to see to begin it is 500+ years away??
What about the Eld's??
What native animals are unclean??

They would have to seriously consider what it meant to be a Muslim even before they set out *ON* this journey.

Comments

[loli-cat.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the makings of a good book there. Of course someone would then parody it, having the ship land on an inhabited planet where the natives practice a variant of christianity so they'd have to have a jihad to wipe out the unclean...

[silkensteel.livejournal.com]

Whoa, cool questions. I want some answers to those. Anyone in your area you could ask? I mean, when you're not Not Killing Your Bosses. :)

[ywns.livejournal.com]

Hi, I came in from the LMBujold friends page.

What direction do they face?

Earth, if it still exists. They might have circular prayer spaces in their masjids to facilitate changes of direction throughout the planet's orbit; I think this has been addressed in a few works.

How can they cope with the fact that they - or their decendants, can't make the Hadjj to Mecca that all Muslims must make during their lives?

That's a big one, which they must have addressed before they left. First, they wouldn't have come lightly; there had to have been a big reason, such as insane population pressure or persecution. Second, they would have left with one or more rulings agreed upon, such as the understanding that they will not be able to perform the Hajj, or the commitment to some compensation like extra charity or public works.

How do you know when times for prayer are?
When do you know when Ramadan begins when the moon you need to see to begin it is 500+ years away??
What about the Eld's??
What native animals are unclean??

They would have to seriously consider what it meant to be a Muslim even before they set out *ON* this journey.

Indeed.

I'll continue this post shortly, insha'allah.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Indeed, looking forward to seeing it.

Living the last year, as I have, in an Islamic country got me to thinking about this when I saw the panel title. I suspect some more is going to be coming out as I process it.

I could see the Hajj developing into a period of prayer of meditation done as a retreat once in a person's life. Going to the "Mecca within" if that makes sense, since one cannot go to the physical location, then one must seek the spiritual location.

[ywns.livejournal.com]

Indeed, Muslims of a mystical bent who are unable to attend Hajj right now often engage in festivities and remembrance (meditations, not to quibble) on the days of the Hajj. It would more likely be annual than once-in-a-lifetime. You're marking your inability to follow the Hajj, not coming up with an actual replacement, an impossibility. So yess, they might leave with a mystical interpretation in hand. This is not without precedent. The primary sources on the Hajj already restrict it to "if you are able to go," in fact.

A real concern would be suiting the situation without altering the essentials of the religion as it was handed down from heaven; religious innovation that violates the foundations is a big, bad deal, & a danger our colonists' legal scholars would weigh very carefully.

*How do you know when times for prayer are?

That's as complicated as the local day. The prayer times are not fixed by the 24 clock but by the earth's rotation w regard to the sun. The prayer times are before sunrise, right after noon (that's astronomical noon, not the modern 12:00), late afternoon (various methods of calculating this exactly), right after sunset, and in the night after twilight has ended.

This could be complicated in terms of a planet with two suns, no rotation period, or a very long rotation. On earth, Muslims living above the arctic circle generally follow the prayer times of the nearest country with a sizable population; keeping worship in the long days & nights is impracticable, & Muslims are very practical with how they approach the sacred law. Long days would fall somewhere into this category of rulings.

In the case of a planet with more than one sun, something might be ruled along the lines of locally redefining noon, twilight, etc., or following the planet's primary only.

*When do you know when Ramadan begins when the moon you need to see to begin it is 500+ years away??
*What about the Elds??

Calendrics:
The condition of seeing the moon is one of several rulings on the matter. Another is that if conditions (weather, etc.) make that impossible, relying on lunar tables is possible. Reliable lunar tables have really only been developed lately; it's a heck of a problem that required a lot of observational & computational input, but the possibility was forseen centuries ago. See http://www.moonsighting.com .

As for the Eids, there'd be no reason not to keep the lunar calendar for religious purposes in addition to any local-space calendar.

*What native animals are unclean??
No animals are unclean anywhere; that's inapropriate language for thinking about halal and haram. Phrase it: what native animals are permitted or forbidden? If alien animals are even edible (seems unlikely to me), our colonist faqihs (jurists) would rule on them based on the school of thought they bring about animals. One is very specific: anything not specifically forbidden in the Qur'an or Sunnah is halal. Another is a little trickier: the name of a thing impacts how you think about it & thus its permissibility. The classic example is the dolphin, which has the Arabic name of khinzir al-ma', "swine of the sea." Naming it "swine" renders it haram in this view, names being seen as a higher level of reality (form) than materiality. I think a similar view exists within Judaism.

There are other schools which see the dietary laws of Islam as ammending the Jewish law, so you get a lot more of the "no eels, no lobster, no bottom-feeding icky critters" type of thing.

***

Anyway, our sleeper-ship colonists would have a body of this stuff thought out with rulings before they leave, and would no doubt have faqihs along to continue to deal with issues as they come up. The traditional view of a fully trained scholar capable of independent legal reasoning is that he is qualified to make rulings anywhere, anytime, anyplace: the sources of the law are big and the righteous scholar is the heir of prophets.

Wa-llahu a'lam (& God knows best). I'm answering these questions as a Muslim with some tiny grounding in legal thinking, and as someone who has thought about the matters. I'm no faqih though and certainly disavow any certainty to this speculative matter!

[patgund.livejournal.com]

"Wa-llahu a'lam (& God knows best). I'm answering these questions as a Muslim with some tiny grounding in legal thinking, and as someone who has thought about the matters. I'm no faqih though and certainly disavow any certainty to this speculative matter!"

Fair enough, since I'm not even one of the people of the book, just soneone who has been exposed for a year to a Wahabbist Sunni enviroment and got used to thinking along those lines.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I'm going to direct a flister of mine to this topic if you do not mind. He's a Muslim and a Star Trek fans and works for a major newspaper, so I think he will have a lot to say on the topic.

"What direction do they face?"

"Earth, if it still exists. They might have circular prayer spaces in their masjids to facilitate changes of direction throughout the planet's orbit; I think this has been addressed in a few works."

Indeed, this was the solution used by a Muslim crew specialist who happened to be a Saudi prince on a shuttle mission in 1985. The Malaysian space agency is working on this and other issues [halal food, etc] for their astronaut who is going up to the ISS next year:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/27/wspace27.xml

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me. Since I'm neither a Muslim or a Person of the Book, I'm looking at a lot of this from the perspective of someone who has lived in an Islamic culture, but is not a part of that faith.

[ismarc.livejournal.com]

I know it's horrible but my first thought is that the ship would be on a pre-programmed course directly for the heart of Alpha Andomeda, HD 358, simplifying the story significantly.

To take the model a little further though: What if they "moved" Mecca (don't ask me how) to a nearby planet so that the pilgramage was via spacecraft. Have other "factions" on local planets with which they were at Hyhad with.

They had to face the galactic core... or even better keep it local heliocentric but make it a binary system with conflicting elliptics and have a holy war over which sun they faced...that ought to spice it up a bit. Make the home planet have multiple moons so that local reckonings are all fubared. And lets not forget the "disagreements" with other factions on neighboring worlds with different celestial geometries.

Of course, I'm all for add technologically superior alien beings nearby with either no religious beliefs or at least ideas that are completely heretical.

Wow! Muslims in space? Get Patrica Keneally on the phone!

[ywns.livejournal.com]

Other moons don't matter one whit; THE moon matters, as the Qur'an states that its cycle is fixed for calendric (and esoteric) purposes.

I can't imagine any real controversy over direction of prayer. One simply faces the Ka'ba for worship to the best of one's ability, as aided by astronomical knowledge. The latter is bound to be pretty sophisticated in a society with interstellar capability. As I mentioned in another reply, prayer areas may well be shapped in arcs or circles for the architecture to harmoniously support the congregation facing a range of directions throughout the local orbit.

It's a very good question if the Ka'ba could be moved (not Makka; Makka is important only insofar as it's the city around the Ka'ba). The Ka'ba can be rebuilt if destroyed; it has been several times. It would only be moved if something were threatening the Earth, a la its implosion in Dan Simmons' Hyperion. Even then, there could be debate about the proper way of doing it. Possibilities that occur to me include moving the whole ka'ba or maintaining a site as close to earth as possible.

As far as ficional ideas about Muslims shooting each other over matters of worship, we should keep in mind that Muslims' views on divergent religious views are generally, historically & doctrinally "they're probably wrong, but that's okay because God's religion is bigger than our understanding" and that's as far as it goes without other provocations.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Or alternately, a la Arthur C. Clarke, if the colonists were fleeing some enviromental catastrophe, and there was room, they may have taken the Ka'ba on board with them.

Of course, at that point, you have a situation in which you may have a lot of colonists that are Shia, Sunni, Sufi, maybe even the odd Druse or two, and may be from all over the world. Which means there may have been an ad hoc "survival first, we'll worry about doctorine once we're safe" decision when the journey started. Which leads a lot of room - and story space - for what happens when they get to their new home

[ismarc.livejournal.com]

On Additional thought: Wouldn't it be reasonable to conject that if the colony ship was generational or picking up the story after several generations of occupation that the nature of the local religion would have evolved. I suggest this due to the fact that many interesting story developments would be closed off if the author were to constrain him/herself to the strictures of the belief. Of course this completely breaks the purpose of your proposed exercise.

I'm not sure that a non-Muslim could do this concept justice as religion is composed of so much more than mere doctrinal mechanics.

[jeran.livejournal.com]

I think at least one author covered the "which direction do you face to pray" by simply having Muslims off Earth have a small specialized navigational computer that told them the direction to Earth at any given time. The assumption was that at those sorts of distances "facing Earth" was as close as you needed to get, the differences in direction to any two points on Earth were simply too small to matter. On another planet it's even simpler since you just need to face Sol and the only variable's local planetary rotation.

Prayer times were handled similarly pragmatically IIRC. The rule was that prayers happen at the local equivalent of the corresponding time on Earth, ie. noon prayer happens at whatever the local noon or equivalent is. You can even make that work on a starship where there isn't a daily solar cycle.

[winterlion.livejournal.com]

Jack Chalker wrote a bit on this in "Birth of Flux and Anchor"....
the quirkiness of the series led to some interesting... futures though. I can't say it was flattering ... but it wasn't terrible either. Just... bad. (he's got a fondness for writing some really messed up stuff)

I'd say you're coming from a much closer perspective... but still science fiction in its own way. Write about it :)

from what I understand it though - animals are considered unclean if they eat their own (or other animals') feces. So that at least I can comment on.

[winterlion.livejournal.com]

okay so I'm decidedly wrong...
but I still say write about it :)

[henglaar.livejournal.com]

All very interesting questions, Patrick. As others have suggested, it would make for interesting science fiction. The trick, as usual, is to make the story about people, rather than about the changes that are required. Sounds like something that C.J. Cherryh would excell at.

And as it sounds like we have at least one person of the book here, their guidance would be invaluable. I know only the summaries I've read, and while they have been written by scholars, they have not been written by followers, and therefore may miss some of the nuances.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

And some of those scholars may have been believers as well. The two don't cancel each other out.

The thing many Western minds have problems grasping though is the nature of the Quar'an. An example, I have read an English translation of the Quar'an. But I cannot say I have *read* the Quar'an, because I cannot read Arabic, and therefore have not read the words of the Prophet.

Which leads to another interesting kettle of worms. Bear in mind that language shifts over time. If you have that 500+ plus sleeper ship, and a couple people make the round trip back to Earth, they may find that the version of Arabic they speak and/or read may be archaic or outmoded by their return. Or that the version of Arabic that the Quar'an was written in may have become like Church Latin - spoken and read by scholars and clergy, but not as much by the laity.

Or even another little glitch - what happens if, in that 1000+ years of the round trip, one version of Islam becomes the only version? What happens to our space travelers if they're Sunni, and come back to a form of Islam that the Shia have become the majority or even only branch? What of the Sufi who finds there *are* no other Sufi left?

[henglaar.livejournal.com]

Some of the scholars may very well have been believers, Patrick, but given the names and credentials on some of the articles I read, I got the impression that they were not. I'm of course well aware that the two are not mutually exclusive. [grin] But an English-sounding professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department is more likely to be an outsider looking in, however qualified, than a believer himself. Not impossible, of course; not everyone who converts to Islam feels a need to get a name change, too. But of a diminished probability, in my opinion.

Yes, I've heard it said that you do not truly know a language until you have learned to think in it. And in any translation, there are words that have direct translations, and words that can only be approximated. This doesn't even account for colloquialisms, where the meaning is usually known to the native speaker, but doesn't make literal sense even in that language. ("He can talk his head off" is an immediate example. Would someone in another language readily know that this is a person who talks excessively?)

So I agree that we who have read the Qur'an in English have not truly read the words of the Prophet as he wrote them. By the same token modern Christians have not truly read the Bible, either, as it certainly was not written in English, French, or any other modern language. (And then there are deliberately slanted translations, such as the infamous King James Bible.)

Language shifts are a good point, but I remember an article by one science fiction writer who was also a linguist, and he indicated that language drift was slowing and might even halt with modern technology: you can hear how something is pronounced for yourself, instead of some instructor's approximation of it, or a distortion by a regional dialect. Assuming no serious degradation of technology, language drift would primarily result as a result of new words coined and new experiences, and could reasonably be expected to be slower. Still, in a thousand years . . . there's bound to be SOME drift (Niven's World of Ptavvs showed that language had changed somewhat, partially because previously "fashionable" words fell out of fashion and new ones had been coined. But they still understood a tape recorded a century before, despite that.)

[nodding] Yes, the idea that another language became dominant, that's a real possibility, and in my not so humble opinion, somewhat more likely than language shifting, per se.

And the possibility of serious changes in the balance of power between differing factions might indeed result in the changes you suggest. Believers might find themselves considered heretics by what they considered to be their own base culture. Disorienting at best, full of conflict as a likelihood.

Just as disconcerting, what if due to a plague or some other occurance natural or political, there was a shift in the balance of power between male believers and female believers? I wouldn't think it likely, but in a thousand years, who knows what could happen? It would certainly be disorienting, perhaps even frightening for someone of the older school to encounter.

The joy of science fiction is that like Plato's thought experiments, you can see what would happen if a factor substantially changed or got out of hand. What would change, what would stay the same? Would anything at all be recognizeable to a person of the past? In David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, he went back in time and killed Christ. When he got back to his own time, the culture and the language were both unrecognizeable to him. He had to go back and talk himself out of the deed to restore things to their previous state.