Day 12.5
"All those people inclined nowadays to pronounce on the eternal meaning of Islamic law could do a lot worse than think about its history first.
As befits so awesome a phenomenon, the science of studying law -- jurisprudence, or fiqh -- came to be considered a duty akin to prayer. No aspect of creation fell outside its scope, and jurists pronounced on questions from the lawfulness of logic to the legal meaning of the moon. They hypothesized fantastically unfortunate dilemmas: what Muslims should do on a desert island, for example, if they ever found themselves pining away alongside a dead shipmate, a pig and a flask of wine (clue: avoid the pork and alcohol until desperate). While some would always focus on big issues such as criminal justice and holy war, others explored far more specialized aspects of the cosmic order -- the calculation of inheritance shares, say, or the jurisprudence of ablutions -- and no problem was ever too personal to escape their collective gaze. A thousand years ago, al-Ghazali, arguably the greatest of all Sunni theologians, subjected the intimacies of marriage to rigorous legal scrutiny, and attributed to Muhammad himself a commandment on the importance of foreplay. Sex was unholy unless preceded by "kisses and sweet words," the Prophet had reportedly warned. "Let none of you come upon his wife like an animal."
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