Strange Bedfellows: Mut'at al-nisa' and Mut'at al-hajj, a Study Based on Sunni and Shi'i Sources of Tafsir, Hadith, and Fiqh.

AuthorRippin, A.

A recent Reuters news report told of Algerian Islamic militants who slit the throats of two sisters who refused to accept proposals of term-restricted marriages. It continued: "The practice of what is known in Arabic as zawaj al-mutaa, which translates into English as a pleasure marriage and usually involves a temporary marriage for a specific period, has become quite popular among some Muslim groups in Algeria."

The status of temporary marriage in Islam is thus a topic of contemporary concern and a matter of continuing academic interest. That modern Algerian groups would adopt what is known to be a Shii practice may suggest an Iranian influence - not too unlikely - or, perhaps, a reinterpretation of the classical texts.

It is one of the merits of Arthur Gribetz' study, a 1990 Hebrew University Ph.D. thesis supervised by Etan Kohlberg and Michael Cook, that it confronts the complexities of both Sunni and Shii opinion on the topic. But more than that, Gribetz takes the whole subject into new areas, drawing attention to the relationship between temporary marriage and leaving the state of ihram inbetween the umra and the hajj, a practice referred to as mutat al-hajj. While Sunnis disallow temporary marriage, they permit mutat al-hajj, although it is generally not encouraged; Shiis, on the other hand, allow both and consider mutat al-hajj the best way of performing the pilgrimage. To confront these ideas, the author focuses on the discussions in both Sunni and Shii legal texts; the point of the study is not to determine the character of pre-Islamic and early Islamic marriage but rather to understand what the exegetes and jurists thought the history of muta was and what the legal understandings are concerning it that arise from that understanding. Even so, Gribetz is unable to restrain himself from asserting at least on occasion what historical truth lies behind all the discussions. This is especially a part of his argument when he wishes to dispose of the contention of John Burton, who in his article "Muta, tamattu and istimta: A Confusion of tafsirs" (in Proceedings, Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, 10th Congress, Edinburgh 9-16 September 1980, ed. R. Hillenbrand [Edinburgh, 1982], 1-11) asserted that the "history" understood by the exegetes and jurists was created out of confusion. For Gribetz, each term must have had a distinct and real referent at some point (his rejoinder to Burton is: "Something must have either existed or...

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