Furore Over Family Planning: Stoking the Flames of Yet Another
Communal Controversy
Yoginder Sikand
The recent statement in favour of family planning issued by the
widely respected Shia scholar and Vice-President of the All-India
Muslim Personal Law Board, Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, has, expectedly,
stirred up a major controversy in Muslim circles. Numerous Muslim
ulama or Islamic scholars and other community leaders have been
quick to denounce the statement, roundly condemning Sadiq and
claiming that family planning has no sanction whatsoever in Islam.
On the other hand, several other Muslims have come out in strong
support of Sadiq’s stance, arguing that Islam does indeed allow
for certain methods of family planning. This heated debate over
the normative Islamic position on family planning is being played
out in the Urdu press, and numerous articles and letters have been
published on the issue, with no clear conclusion appearing to
emerge on what exactly Islam has to say on this vexed subject.
A good indication of the issues involved in the ongoing debate are
the numerous articles on the subject that appeared in the pages of
the Urdu Rashtriya Sahara, one of the largest selling Urdu dailies
published from Delhi, on the 26th of September. The conservative
ulama clearly seem to be dominating the debate, and the paper
carries numerous pieces penned by them. As some of them appear to
see it, family planning is a sinister ‘anti-Islamic’ plot hatched
by hidden ‘enemies’ of Islam. Accordingly, Sadiq’s statement is
presented as, unwittingly or otherwise, part of this alleged
conspiracy. Thus, a certain Maulana Muhammad Inamullah Siddiqui of
the Deoband madrasa declares Sadiq’s statement as being ‘wholly
against’ the Quran and the Hadith, the normative statements
attributed to the Prophet. It is, he says, the result of a
‘conspiracy’ hatched by the BJP to fan anti-Muslim hatred. A
senior Deobandi leader and member of the Muslim Personal Law
Board, Maulana Muhammad Burhanuddin Sambhali, declares family
planning to be ‘against Islam’ (khilaf-i-islam), and accuses Sadiq
of providing an excuse to non-Muslims to ‘rejoice’ by creating
‘even more problems’ for the Muslims by setting off a controversy
on the question of family planning. In a similar vein, Maulana
Jameel Ilyasi, self-styled head of the All-India Association of
Masjid Imams (‘All-India Tanzim ‘Aima-i-Masajid) pronounces
Sadiq’s statement to be completely ‘against the shariah’.
Some of the ulama participants in the debate on family planning
seek to back up their claims by selective quotations from the
Quran and the Hadith, interpreting them in order to prove the
‘Islamicity’ of their stance. This is what Maulana Sayyed
Jalaluddin Umri, deputy head of the Islamist Jama’at-I-Islami Hind
and one of its chief ideologues, seeks to do in his piece
revealingly titled ‘Family Planning: The Product of a Wrong
Islamic Interpretation’. Umri reveals a complete insensitivity to
the reality and immensity of the population explosion crisis,
dismissing the arguments of the advocates of family planning as
completely misconceived. ‘If the population of any community in
the country is increasing, what is the reason for concern?’, he
naively asks. Rather than see this as a ‘problem’, he says, it
should actually be considered as a blessing, for, he claims, a
growing population adds to the country’s ‘manpower’ (afradi quvvat),
which would allegedly be ‘useful in the service of the country and
the community’, working to strengthen both. Umri thus turns a
complete blind eye to the plight of the poor labouring under the
burden of large families. He conveniently makes no reference to
the millions of unemployed, poverty-stricken and illiterate
Muslims (and others) who are by no stretch of imagination engaged
in the sort of ‘useful service’ that he claims a mounting
population will help promote.
Umri insists that family planning has no ‘Islamic’ sanction,
claiming that those who argue otherwise ‘wrongly’ interpret the
shariah in order to ‘change the intention of the Quran’. Poverty
does not result from a mounting population, he claims, for God, in
His wisdom, allocates to all of His creatures his or her own share
of sustenance (rozi). To fear that population growth would lead to
poverty is thus, he argues, erroneous, and is, he seems to
suggest, tantamount to doubting God’s beneficence. In this regard
he quotes a Quranic verse that exhorts people not to kill their
children for fear of poverty, assuring them that God shall provide
for them. Aware that pro-family planning Muslims take this verse
as condemning the killing of children already born and not as
denouncing family planning as such, Umri interprets the verse to
argue that the Quran not only denounces the killing of living
children but also the ‘intention’ behind the act. This would,
presumably, also include methods of family control other than
killing children after birth. Umri claims that the Quran bitterly
opposes the desire to limit the size of the family simply because
of the fear of poverty. This he roundly condemns, likening it to
the fear of the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs who ‘doubted God’s
sustenance (razaqi)’. Controlling the size of one’s family for
purely economic reasons, he thus appears to argue, weakens one’s
faith in God’s mercy and bounty. Umri goes so far as to claim that
if one resorts to family control methods for fear of poverty
resulting from a large family, ‘it would, on a small scale, be
akin to the actions of the pagan Arabs, who killed their
children’.
‘Umri is aware of the fact that other Muslim scholars have indeed
allowed for certain family planning techniques, particularly the
practice of ‘azl or coitus interruptus, that is methods that
ensure that the seminal fluid of the man does not enter the
woman’s uterus. ‘Umri’s condemns this in no uncertain terms, and
claims that the Prophet considered ‘azl to be ‘pointless’ (la
hasil). Umri here quotes a hadith related by Abu Said Khudri, a
companion of the Prophet, according to which the Prophet is said
to have declared that it was ‘preferable’ to desist from ‘azl as
‘it could not stop God from creating the creatures He had decided
to send to this world till the Day of Judgment’ in any case. Umri
quotes another hadith report, according to which the Prophet
announced that when a couple has intercourse it is not necessary
that a child be conceived, for this is a matter that God alone
decides. This suggests, Umri tells his critics, that one is
completely mistaken if one believes that by practicing ‘azl one
can stop a child from being born, for the birth of a child is
something that is in God’s hands alone. Hence, he insists, ‘azl is
‘unnecessary’ (ghayr zaruri) and ‘unnatural’ (ghayr fitri).
That Umri’s position on ‘azl is questionable from within the
broader Islamic tradition itself is clearly apparent in an article
that appears in the same page of the Urdu Rashtriya Sahara, penned
by a scholar from the Barelvi Muslim sect, Maulana Mumtaz Alam
Misbahi. Misbahi evokes a different hadith attributed to the
Prophet, related by Jabir bin Abdullah, who reported that he used
to practice ‘azl ‘when the Quran was being revealed’, and that
when the Prophet heard of this he did not prohibit it. Hence,
Misbahi argues, in complete contrast to ‘Umri, that ‘azl is indeed
‘permissible’, provided the husband has the consent of his wife
and only for proper reasons, such as for, instance, if their
economic conditions are such that they are not in a position to
properly rear another child or if pregnancy poses a grave medical
danger to the woman. Misbahi also adds, echoing what appears to be
a general consensus among the ulama, that certain other methods of
family planning, such as vasectomy and abortion are, as a rule,
not permissible in the shariah.
The lack of any consensus of what precisely constitutes the
definitive Islamic position on family planning is further
exemplified in the arguments put forward by certain modern
educated, non-ulama Muslim participants in the debate in the pages
of the Urdu Rashtriya Sahara. One of these is Iqbal Ansari, a
Muslim social activist, who insists that contraception is not
‘anti-Islamic’, and that neither the Quran nor the Hadith clearly
prohibit ‘azl. Interestingly, some of these pro-family planning
voices are those of Muslim women. Thus, Naheed Taban, who works
for the Urdu unit of the National Council for Educational Training
and Research, argues in support of family planning. She writes
that ‘Nowhere in Islam is family planning forbidden’ and ‘Islam
does not say that people should keep producing children’. If some
people are opposed to vasectomy, she says, there are other methods
that are permissible. She appeals to Muslims to move ‘in
accordance with the times’, and, critiquing the ulama who oppose
family planning on supposedly ‘Islamic’ grounds, makes so bold as
to declare that, ‘The ulama are not at all bothered about [the
plight of] women, but are concerned only about themselves’.
Similarly, another Muslim woman, Safia Mahdi of the Jamia Millia
Islamia, appears to concede the gravity of the population problem,
and argues, without going into the intricacies of Islamic law,
that the solution lies in women’s empowerment and education.
The confusion over the legitimacy of family planning in Islam that
has now assumed the form of a major controversy reflects the
obvious fact that the ulama themselves are not unanimous in
agreeing as to precisely what the shariah, which they regularly
invoke, actually means in terms of concrete laws on a range of
issues. Many of them appear to take the shariah, or what Muslims
regard as the divinely revealed path, as synonymous with fiqh or
jurisprudence, which is, to an extent, the product of human
reflection on the Quran and the Hadith over the centuries. They
also offer conflicting interpretations of Quranic verses and
invoke different Hadith reports that appear to provide differing
prescriptions in order to legitimize their own stances, which, as
the markedly divergent positions of Umri and Misbahi on the issue
of ‘azl show, provide competing understandings of the legitimacy
or otherwise of family planning in Islam. To add to the confusion,
some ulama appear to regard ‘family planning’ (khandani
mansubanadi) as synonymous with vasectomy (nasbandi), ignoring
various other methods of birth control that other Muslims argue
are indeed permissible in Islam. Furthermore, they also turn a
blind eye to the views of numerous other ulama, possibly more
learned than themselves, who have argued, using the same
scriptural resources, for the legitimacy of certain methods of
family planning. As Iqbal Ansari writes in his article in the Urdu
Rashtriya Sahara, and as Bassim Musallam persuasively argues in
his widely acclaimed book, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control
Before the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1989),
the eleventh century Abu Hamid Imam Ghazali, the doyen of the
Sunni ‘ulama and regarded as one of the greatest Islamic scholars
ever, accepted the permissibility of ‘azl. Following in his
footsteps, leading ulama in countries such as Indonesia,
Bangladesh and Iran have, in recent times, played a key role in
their country’s efforts to regulate their burgeoning populations
through their involvement in state-sponsored family planning
efforts.
This said, it must also be stressed that the problem of a mounting
population is a national one, and not one limited to Muslims
alone, contrary to what Hindutva ideologues, ever on the prowl for
any stick to beat the Muslims with, seek to argue. Numerous Hindu
religious and political leaders, one suspects, are probably
opposed to family planning among Hindus themselves while
vociferously demanding that Muslims limit their families. By
damning the Muslims as allegedly plotting to turn India into a
Muslim majority country by rapidly multiplying Hindutva ideologues
completely ignore the fact that the rate of growth of the Muslim
population has, in fact, decelerated faster than that of the
Hindus. They also conveniently choose to brush aside the rather
obvious point that population growth is inversely related to
economic and educational levels. Given the fact that Muslims, by
and large, are a marginalized minority characterised by a
worryingly high level of illiteracy, it is hardly surprising that
they have registered a higher rate of growth. In this they are
hardly unique, for the same holds true in the case of other
similarly placed groups, such as the Dalits and Tribals. In other
words, Islam as such has little to do with a higher Muslim rate of
growth, and does not appear to be a significant factor in
determining reproduction patterns. Muslims who wish to limit the
number of their children, generally for economic reasons, would do
so in any case, seeking legitimacy for this from the views of
those Islamic scholars who argue that certain methods of birth
control are legitimate in Islam. The centrality of economic and
educational levels, rather than religion as such, in determining
Muslims’ attitudes to birth control is readily apparent when one
compares Kerala, India’s only almost completely state and where
Muslims form a fourth of the population, with Bihar, where
economic and educational levels remain dismal. The Muslims of
Kerala exhibit a far lower rate of growth than the Biharis, both
Hindus and Muslims. This suggests that as economic and educational
levels among Muslims improve their reproductive rates would
automatically decline. The same holds true for other communities
as well.
These basic facts of demography are, however, completely ignored
by Hindutva ideologues and the numerous Muslim ulama who have
joined issue with them. The entire debate now risks being turned
into yet another communal controversy, with Hindutva leaders
provoking alarming, and grossly misleading, fears of a Muslim
takeover of the country, and with many Muslim ulama, biting the
Hindutva bait, denouncing what they regard as yet another
‘conspiracy’ against Islam.
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