 Good evening. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Paul Heath. I am the president of the Legal Research Foundation. It's our great pleasure to introduce tonight our visiting scholar, Professor Raj Bala, to speak to you. Professor Bala has been in the country for some time and is undertaking an extraordinary amount of work for us as visiting scholar, and we'd like to thank you very much for that, Professor. Professor Bala is the associate dean for international and comparative law and the Rice Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas School of Law. He practiced at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he twice won the President's Award for Excellence thanks to his service as a delegate to the United Nations. I think it's Commission on International Trade Law. It's un-sutrile. A Harvard Law School graduate, he completed master's degrees at the London School of Economics and Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and an undergraduate degree at Duke as an Andrea B. Duke Scholar. He is the author of a leading textbook in international trade law, the first treaty on GAT in nearly 50 years and a new book on TPP. He is the first non-Muslim American scholar to write a textbook on Islamic law. I'm told he likes visiting New Zealand, which is nice because it is very good to have you here. Professor Bala's topic tonight is reinterpreting Islamic law from women to war, and I would invite you to welcome Professor Bala tonight. Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Salam alaikum. What I just said, Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim means in the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate, and then I said peace to all of you. In a standard Islamic setting, starting any presentation or for that matter any written work with the Bismillah would be very customary, and starting with salam alaikum, peace be with you, would also be very standard. And it is fine for non-Muslims, in fact it's a nice diplomatic gesture in most countries to start that way. The Bismillah happens to be the very first recitation that Allah sent through the archangel Gabriel, or Jibril, the same archangel who was at the Annunciation of Mary, to the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in 610 A.D. And the Bismillah is in Surah, or chapter 99 of the Holy Quran. You've noticed I just used the prefects, Holy Quran, as we would with Holy Bible, and the suffix P-B-U-H, peace be upon him, after mentioning the prophet Muhammad. And here and after, please know that I mean to use that prefects and suffix whenever I refer to the Quran or the prophet, but I'll drop it just for efficiency's sake. I'm very delighted to be back in this lovely country with my family, our daughter Shira and my wife Kara, and to see my dear and dearest old friend and law school classmate, Scott Opticon. I'm extraordinarily indebted to the Legal Research Foundation, to Your Honor, to Craig, to Sian, to Anita. They've just worked so hard to bring us here. I think we have about a thousand emails and counting, but it's all coming to pass. Now, since I've come here, it's been a delight to give not only a course in international trade law, but also seven presentations, public presentations including two interviews. And they've all been important not for reasons of the speaker, not for reasons of me, but because of the topics. In fact, two of the topics last week on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and on international trade law were really at bottom about wealth and poverty. But this presentation is the most important. Since I've come to this beautiful country, at least 40 people have been killed in Manchester, London, and Tehran. And that's not counting other parts of the world. And they've been killed in the name of Islam or Islamist terrorism or Islamic violence. And if nothing else you remember after tonight's presentation, remember this, all of those killings were utterly un-Islamic and have nothing to do with Islam. And I'm going to try and show you why. We are all searching from Washington to Wellington and Albany to Auckland. How do we defeat terrorism in the name of religion? When President Kennedy set up or formalized the U.S. Special Operations Forces under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, he made sure that it was understood there were three pillars to Special Ops. One is of course defense, military, the gun stuff. But there were two others. One is engagement, engagement with the local population, understanding the culture, the language, the religion. And the second was development, economic development, wells, water wells, literacy programs. And I can tell you, and this is the key theme of tonight. There is no military solution. There's no military solution to defeating extremism in the name, in the perverted name, we should say, of Islam. The battle we are in is an education battle. And we lawyers, we're at the front lines right there with the Special Ops, not in the military sense, but in helping move Muslim communities around the world to reinterpret their sacred text and their sacred sources. And that's an odd position for us to be in, because most of us are not Muslim. And we're very cognizant of the dark history in which the non-Muslim world engaged with the Muslim world, the Crusades. And yet it's that external impulse that we're trying to deliver peacefully to catalyze what is nothing short of an enlightenment across the Muslim world. That's the education battle we are in. And so what I hope tonight to explain to you is exactly what some of the intellectual weapons are that we need to reinterpret some of the most controversial topics in Islamic law. Another way for those of us who like treaty interpretation and statutory interpretation is to understand tonight's presentation as addressing the simple issue, how do we interpret legal texts? That's sort of what we're getting at. So it's a common problem across sacred legal systems and secular legal systems also. The first step or the first weapon in this intellectual battle is to understand where Islamic law or what we commonly know as the sharia comes from. Now the sharia or the word sharia means Islamic law. There is no need to say sharia law. It's like saying New Zealand law law. It's redundant. Sharia includes the term law. And it is understood as a path. Initially in the old Arabic and pre-Islamic times it meant a path as a path in the desert where a camel might be led, for example, to an oasis, a watering hole. But it later took on a meeting that Daoists are very familiar with. The Dao, an all-encompassing way of life. And sharia or Islamic law is indeed an all-encompassing way of life. How we each deal with each other in our homes, in our bedrooms, in the public square, with the government in all aspects of life. And we care about how we deal with each other because God has intervened in human history to give us a sacred scripture, the Holy Quran. And God has told us in that sacred scripture that there is a day of judgment. What Christians know as particular judgment and final judgment. In the Muslim theology, both judgments exist. At the end of time, final judgment upon death, particular judgment. And we stand alone before God with no intercessory agent. And we are called to account for what we've done. And what we're going to be judged on in Muslim theology is not how successful we were in doing everything right, but how hard we tried. Islam itself, the word means submission. Submission. Submission to what? Submission to the will of Allah. So how do we follow a path to submit to the will of Allah? Well, we use the sources of law of sharia that he has given us. And he's given us two fundamental sources. The first is the Holy Quran. And the second is the sunnah. Now the Holy Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, as I mentioned, through the Archangel Jibril. Across 22 years, from 610 AD to 632 AD, the year the Prophet died. And during those years, he would feel a sense of something that would call him out to the desert around Mecca and Medina after 621, when he migrated to Medina or 622, he would feel that sense of something that would call him out. And he would get revelations. And the revelations, the first one, the bismillah, were put into his heart in a way that he could not possibly forget. Because he, by tradition, was illiterate. He did not know how to read and write. But they were thrust into his heart in such a way that his mind could not forget. And at the end of his life, he was asked by Jibril to re-recite the entire Quran from beginning to end twice. So the 6300 verses we get, which subsequently were put into 114 chapters, were checked each year of his life and double checked at the end of his life. It's a fascinating story, which maybe we can talk about in the question and answer is how we actually got a written canonical text of the Quran. It came at 652 during the first caliphate. It's a very, very interesting story, if you will, of Quranic archaeology. But we'll take that as a given. So the key point on this first source is that these are reliable and they were heard. In fact, the very first, that bismillah, was heard by none other than his beloved wife, Khatija, with whom he enjoyed a monogamous relationship. And they had children. They were married in 595 A.D. She died in 619 A.D. It was a terrible blow personally for him. And she could have said to him when he came back in 610 A.D. from the first revelation, she could have said to him, you were out in the desert. It's hot. You're dehydrated. You need electrolytes. She didn't say that. She said, you have received an authentic revelation from God. And just to double check, she took him to their cousin, Waraka. Waraka said the same thing. You've received an authentic revelation from God. And Waraka is important because Waraka was a Christian. In fact, women and Christians play an indispensable positive role in the birth of this faith. Without them, it could have easily been snuffed out. And that's something right away you can see that extremists don't know or if they know they deliberately suppress. Now, if a question is answered by the Holy Quran, then that's it. There's no appeal. And generally speaking, questions, a lot of time is spent. And we're going to spend some time on the three questions I mentioned up there on the board on how you interpret the Quran. It's just like there's whole schools of thought of biblical interpretation, treaty interpretation, statutory interpretation, and literary interpretation. So also there is of Quranic interpretation. We sometimes think in the United States that we developed schools of interpretation. Or if we didn't, the British did. A thousand years before then, it was happening in Quranic schools in Basra and Kufa and Mecca and Medina. And actually much of the indebtedness, we have much to pay in terms of debt to those ways of interpreting. So we'll talk about Quranic interpretation in a minute. The second top source is the tradition of the prophet. Sunnah means tradition. And the tradition of the prophet is recorded in multi-volume compilations. Seven or eight volumes per compiler known as the hadith. Now these hadith are the non-prophetic utterances of Muhammad. Things he said, things he didn't say, things he did, things he didn't do that are recorded between roughly 700, 750 AD to about 950 AD. After he died, there was a huge amount of effort by Muslim scholars to record all of his non-prophetic utterances. He himself in his life, being a very humble person, told all of his Sahaba companions, don't focus on what I am saying. Focus instead on the message that has been revealed to me. Now of course, like any sacred text, it's not a comprehensive statutory code. There are a lot of general principles and then there are some specific rules. For example, the rule that we need two witnesses for a contract, that's going to be in the Quran. But on the other hand, what about the question of whether or not during the holy month of Ramadan, which we are currently in, is it all right for women to go to a mosque, pitch a tent, stay overnight in the tent so that they can worship 24-7? That's not a question answered in the Quran. So devotees went to him and said, can we do this? And he said yes. So there's the source of the rule, that's second source. The sunnah as recorded in the hadith. Now hadith scholarship, like Quranic scholarship, is itself a massive area. In fact, depending on the compilation of hadiths, and there are seven major ones, seven or eight major ones, there are about between six, seven thousand and fifteen thousand, in fact one even has twenty-two thousand different specific statements that Muhammad said on top of what's in the Quran. And Muslim scholars carefully evaluate each statement for their reliability. And they evaluate the reliability according to what we know in evidence law as the chain of transmission. It's not. If Prophet Muhammad said to A, said to B, then said to C, then said to D a statement. And that chain of transmission crosses many, many years and many, many transmitters. And some of those transmitters are not reliable or not of good moral character, not adal. Then the hadith statement is not so reliable. Kind of like having a drug dealer up on the witness stand. But on the other hand, if we have few transmitters and each one is a sterling individual based on our historical knowledge of their biography, then the hadith is reliable. So when it is said that a suicide bomber awaiting him or her in heaven are ninety-nine virgins, that's not a reliable hadith. It's not in the Quran, despite what right wing fanatics in the United States would have you believe. It's not in the Quran. And in the hadith compilation that it's in, it's in one of the less well regarded compilers. And it's not a reliable hadith. In fact, the two most reliable hadith compilations are by Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. And you can buy an excellent translation of the Quran and Bukhari and Muslim right off Amazon. And you can start stalking your Islamic law, Islamic finance library for two or three hundred US or less. And they're beautiful, usually leather bound copies. So that's our second major source. If we get a question answered by one or two, that's it, case over. Notice these sources are called fundamental. Contrary to what you hear in the media, and again from right wing extremists, the word fundamentalist is properly used in the context of saying a person who wants to return to the fundamentals of the faith, meaning the fundamental sources of the faith. They want to rely on just these two. And the fundamentalist project in Islamic law is to try and avoid reliance on these additional sources that we'll talk about in a minute. Why? To maintain the purity of the sharia. Well, what's the worry about maintaining the purity? Well, let me give you both a religious and a secular example. One way to explain why, to the extent our very imperfect, limited human minds can understand why God revealed the Quran, is because twice before we strayed. The Old Testament was revealed and the Old Testament prophets, all of whom are acknowledged in Islamic theology. They followed Old Testament rules for a while, but by the time the Ten Commandments are shortly thereafter, people started straying. They started violating the Ten Commandments. They were killing each other. They were committing adultery. So then God, in His infinite mercy, gave us the New Testament, giving Christ two great commandments. Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor like yourself. But then Christians started straying. They warred with each other. There were schisms. So then God again in His infinite mercy gave the final revelation with the final seal of the prophet and that is the Holy Quran. So that's sort of one explanation. The other explanation why we want to maintain the purity and not stray from the line with adding an additional ways of thinking comes from our own US Constitution. Oh my gosh, you can burn the flag. Oh my gosh, corporations can give unlimited campaign contributions to political action committees. Oh my gosh, you can carry concealed weapons into a university classroom. Is that what the First and Second Amendment means? Who's coming up with this? We're straying from the fundamental sources and if you're thinking Justice Scalia, that's the right thought. But if you're thinking he came up with it, that's the wrong thought. Ibn Tamia, the traditionists, the great traditionists back in 1000 AD, 1200 AD were focusing on the fundamentals. So fundamentalist need should not be conflated with violent, crazy, nutjob extremists. That's not the right meaning. It actually is a deep intellectual project to make sure the children of Abraham don't stray again because God gave it to us one last time this revelation. But still sometimes, especially as the ages roll on and technology gets enhanced, we have new questions we need to think about. And so there's a third or secondary sources. There are third and fourth sources to look at, sources three and four. They're secondary sources. We only go to them if we don't go to the fundamental, can't resolve the question. And here's an example. Can a Muslim travel by airplane? Well, that's definitely not in the Quran. It's definitely not in the idea. There were no airplanes around. Now, let me give you some answers with reasons and answer with reason. And then let me give you which is the right reason. Okay, first answer. Yes, a Muslim can travel by an airplane because that will help stimulate the economy because we'll use, I'm poking a little bit of fun here, Qatar Airways or Emirates or Saudi Airways. So we'll generate more business, more travel. That's an economic justification. Let me give you a public interest justification. Yes, a Muslim can travel by an airplane comma because we can then support the state airline again, Qatar Emirates or Saudi. Third reason. Yes, a Muslim can travel by an airplane comma because then the Muslim can reunite with his or her family. That's a human rights sort of family oriented justification. All three answers are right, but for the wrong reason. The right answer with the right reason is this. A Muslim can travel by an airplane because an airplane is analogous to the common modes of transport during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, 610 to 632 AD. And those modes were camel, caravan and horseback. Analogy, analogy. You can get the right answer, but you have to get the right reason too. Now, why do we constrain, why do Islamic legal scholars constrain the mode of legal reasoning? Why do we focus on reasoning by analogy? Again, the influence of the traditionist project to try and stay on the straight path. And that is another secondary name for Islam. It's the straight path towards God to that day of judgment. If we start talking about economic reasoning or public interest reasoning or human rights reasoning, well then any crazy law professor like me can come up with some spiffy law review article and give you a reason to do it. We don't want that to happen. That's what's happened to the U.S. Constitution. This is the thinking in Al-Azhar University or International Islamic Law University. So, kiosk is specifically reasoning by analogy. Now, our fourth source of Islamic law, if we still don't have, we're still debating what's the right analogy. And we can debate a lot about analogies. For example, would you say a Muslim can travel by rocket ship? Because now you're going out of space. Are you going into outer space? You're going to debate the rocket ship versus the airplane analogy back to the horse drawn horse or camel caravan. Then we have Muslim scholars sitting together in a Quranic school, men, and they're debating and trying to reach a consensus. So, for example, is it permissible for a woman to have an abortion? If so, under what conditions? And if so, until what day in the pregnancy? There is no universal consensus across the Sharia on this question. Different Islamic schools have different consensus. And the short answer is 42 days or 120 days on the time limit. 42 days say some because that's the day in which God implants a soul, insolment, something that the early Christian fathers debated and gave up on. Insolment into the human soul, into the fertilized egg. Others say 120 days. And so schools of Islamic law can have, reach a consensus and they can have dissents within the consensus and different schools can have different consensus. And likewise on the conditions for an abortion, that depends on the school and what consensus it's reached. Some say life of the mother, some will say psychological health of the mother as well as life depends. Some will also debate whether or not it must be a Muslim doctor who does the abortion. Now these decisions in terms of analogical reasoning and consensus are recorded in treatises. Muslim scholars love treatise writing. And so they have many, many treatise on evidence, treatise on family law, treatise on euthanasia. Many of them typically are in Arabic but more and more becoming translated. And I say that love for treatise writing because it's somewhat of a lost art in the U.S. legal academy which is a great shame. The project in the Muslim legal mind of trying to put together a field of law and get it down and hand it down, hand down that canon is still really admired in a way that's not in some other legal academies. Normally all of our questions are going to be answered if we go through to these four sources. Now I should pause and point out that as you probably know and we'll get a chance maybe in the question answers, there are two great denominations in Islam, Sunni and Shia. About 80 to 85% of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are Sunni. About 15 to 20% are Shia. Within the Sunni world there are four major schools of Islamic law and they have their own as I said majority and minority splits. And within the Shia world there are three major divisions, 12er in Iran, 7er and 5er. So what I'm going to talk about when we do this is basically cutting across all of the divisions and saying this is generally applicable to all of them. There are some deviations but we can maybe talk about those later. And I'm going to talk about one though now. What happens if you don't get into, you don't get a resolution using these four sources of Islamic law? Then through the ages additional ways of interpreting and reading a text have come into play. One of them is public interest reasoning. I mentioned that known as mazlaha. But this is the big one. This is how we battle extremists. Ishtihad. Ishtihad is a name that all a word, an Arabic word that all Americans should be a lot more familiar with. They tend to know jihad but they don't know what jihad means. They think it means suicide bombing. Actually it means struggle. And in fact that's from the sun. Because one person went up to Muhammad one day and said what's the best form of jihad? And he said you know what the best form of jihad is? A word, a word of truth to an unjust ruler. Not a bomb, not a sword, a word. They tend to not know what jihad means and they don't know this keyword. Ishtihad. Now why is that word so important? That's independent reasoning. That's where what all of us in the English common law tradition are used to. Bringing in law and economics, bringing in human rights, bringing in public interest reasoning. To come to a conclusion. Now amazingly, around about 950 A.D. Sunite legal scholars, the ones in the four major Sunite schools, said you know what it's been about 300 and 50, 400 years since the prophet died. We're worried about straying from the straight path. We're in the Abbasid Caliphate now to beg that some strange ideas are coming out. We are worried about those flag burning and second amendment type problems. So we are closing the gate to Ishtihad. This is like law professors saying you cannot reason independently anymore. It's known as the closing of the gate or closing of the door to Ishtihad. You must just use these four top sources and preferable of these two. Ibn Tamia was one of the great traditionists who said, yep, let's close the gate to Ishtihad. Even though he sometimes said it needs to be reopened, but we'll come to that. Instead of using our own independent legal reasoning, we must follow the greats that preceded us, the great scholars that preceded us. This is almost like saying the new justice Gorsuch saying, I can't use my mind. The only thing I can do is apply what Justice Marshall or Justice Douglas said. I'm just mechanically following. Same idea we see today back then. The problem with the closing of the gate to Ishtihad is it has resulted in the ossification of the legal system. That is to say it's become more and more rigid as it forces up decisions to these first two sources. And that's what I want to give you in the three examples that are so controversial. So the reopening project Ishtihad as some Muslim reformists talk about is so vital. And again, think of a United States special operations forces, woman or man, in a village in Afghanistan, literacy rate, 50% if you're lucky, 30% for girls, one copy of the Holy Quran in the hands of an old guy who's hell bent, sure he knows how to interpret it. And that special op has to say, you know Ishtihad would be a great idea. That's what our guys have to do. That's what our guys have to do. And they know it. All right, so let's start with some examples of reinterpreting Islamic law. The first one, can a Muslim beat his wife? So surah means chapter, ayah means verse with a t it's plural. So you can say surah as well. And we have in chapter four surah four, ayah 34. So you can go home and look these up. The following passage. And you'll see it has three sentences. The third one is the key one. Husbands should take full care of their wives with the bounties God has given to some more than others. And with what they spend out of their own money. Righteous wives are devout and guard what God would have them guard in their husband's absence. Third sentence. If you, that's the husband, fear high handedness from your wives. Remind them of the teaching of God. Then ignore them when you go to bed. And then hit them. So a three fold graded punishment. If the husband fears high handedness from your wives. Remind them of the teachings of God. Then ignore them when you go to bed. Then hit them. And then if they obey you, you have no right to act against them. Now tragically through the ages, and I certainly don't want to say domestic violence is limited to Muslim communities because it's absolutely not. But tragically through the ages, many Muslim women have suffered domestic violence. If you look at other translations, that is the one from Abdul Halim by Oxford University Press. But if you look at all of them and you look at the key words, it doesn't get any better. For example, here's one from AJ Arbery in 1955. If you fear they may be rebellious, admonish them, banish them to their couches and beat them. Then you get the same translation from Professor Majid Fakri in DC in 2002. And the meaning of the glorious Koran. In 1919, the first English scholar to translate the Koran, Marmadukh Pikthal, men are in charge of women because Allah has made them one of them to excel the other. And because they spend of their property to support women. So good women are obedient. As for those whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, banish them to their beds and scourge them. If you literally know what scourge means from Lent and the stations of the cross, it's pretty nasty. Now, you do get Muslim scholars trying to take the rougher edge off of the verb beat, hit, scourge. Some of them say, for example, that what's really going on is a tapping on the woman's wrist as if by a toothbrush. Others say it's like taking a scarf and just tapping like that. But we know as lawyers, that's not much protection for a woman. Because that kind of tapping quickly falls down the slippery slope to serious violence and even death. So we need something better. And moreover, what is that trigger event anyway? High handedness really mean? Well, the high handedness verb in Arabic is nashuz. And the verb that is translated, I should say the adjective, the high handedness and the verb beat or hit is daraba. Along comes a woman in 2009 who I learned about in Lawrence, Kansas. My daughter went to Montessori school with their kids and she had come from Iran. And she said, Oh, you're writing this book about Islamic law. Have you heard about this new translation of the Quran by Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar? And it's called the sublime Quran. So I said, No, I've not heard of this. We're talking in the parking lot, dropping our kids off at school, having this conversation about this Quran. It's great. It's a sublime Quran. I said, Let's get it. So I get it off Amazon. And here's how Laleh Bakhtiar translates 434. Men are supporters of wives. Now what we had earlier was husbands should take full care of their wives. There is a clear difference. One is more paternalistic. One is more partnership. Men are supporters of their wives because God has given some of them an advantage over others. That is, some men are wealthier than others and because they spend of their wealth. And then where it has traditionally said that righteous wives are devout and guard what they should guard in the husband's absence, it says the ones in accord with morality are the ones who are morally obligated and the ones who guard the unseen of what God has kept safe. We've changed the pronoun. It's not that the women have to behave a certain way. It's both men and women. And now this all important third sentence directed at men, the husband. And those, that is the women, whose resistance you fear, not disobedience, not high-handedness, those resistance. Here's what it says. Then admonish them and abandon them in their sleeping places and go away from them. Go away from them. Not beat, hit, scourge, but go away. Now how does Laleh Bakhtiar change? She doesn't. This is the first and one of the coolest examples of reinterpreting Islamic law. We know that as lawyers, one of the best things to do is hang the other side with its own words. She doesn't even use ishtihad to get to this interpretation. What she does is she looks at, in particular, that verb, darabah. And she goes back doing a historical lexicographic analysis of what darabah meant between 610 and 632 AD when the revelations came to the prophet. And guess what it meant? Stamp or stop with one's foot, beat or strike, cite as an example or a dispute, cast, throw out, fling upon the ground, engender, turn about, make a sign or point with the hand, prohibit, prevent, seek glory, avoid or shun or leave, turn away oneself to be with shame, be in a state of commotion, be in a state between hope and fear, and finally, to go away. So we have basically about 20 different meanings of the verb darabah. It is an inherently ambiguous verb as of the time of the revelation. How do we know then, if we have multiple definitions of the key Quranic verb, how do we know which one to pick? Ah, let's go to the sunnah, number two. Is there anything in the hadith, anything at all that suggests Muhammad beat his wives? No. There's more extensive analysis of what the prophet said and of his biography than there is even of Jesus. That's a historical fact. And there is nothing in any of that, any of those compilations that suggests Muhammad beat his wives. To the contrary, he was a loving husband and father and grandfather. He used to love to put his kids up on his shoulders, play with them. So if we have multiple meanings of a verb, Dr. Bakhtiar says, which one do we pick? Pick the one that is most in the court with the sunnah. Why do we pick beat or hit or scourge? The guys picked it. The guys picked it. And they stuck with it until she came along. So what's the response to this translation, this 2009 translation? She's a woman and she's a Shiite. She's an American raised as a Christian, went to Tehran, fell in love with Farsi and Arabic, studied it, got her PhD and translated. Well, who is she? Well, I think she's got a lot more credentials than Osama bin Laden ever had or al-Baghdadi or any of those ISIS or al-Qaeda leaders. They're not scholars. But what they do is they argue ad hominem against the woman. Very classic move. We see it in law faculty meeting sometimes too. So I can't just point the finger. Alright, that's the first example. Second example. Must a woman wear a veil? This is the passage in the Holy Quran known as the descent of the hijab. Now Burqa bans, let's be clear. Hijab is just generally means veil. Burqa is head to foot and no face, the face is covered entirely. And at most it might have a grill like you see in the Taliban Afghanistan, a grill for the woman to look through. Next most restrictive is the niqab. And that has the slit for the eyes. When my wife and daughter came to Saudi Arabia, daughter was below the age of having to wear the abaya. Why for? Why for? But didn't need to wear the headscarf because they were very nice to foreigners. And you noticed when Melania went, she didn't have to wear anything. I mean, no, buy it. So where do we get this veiling idea? It's in 3353. And here's what it says. Believers do not enter the Prophet's apartments for a meal unless you are given permission to do so. Do not linger until a meal is ready. When you are invited, enter then. When you've taken your meal depart, do not stay on and talk for that would offend the Prophet, though he would shrink from asking you to leave. But God does not shrink from the truth. Here's the key sentence. When you ask his, that's the Prophet's wives, for something, do so from behind a screen. This is purer both for your hearts and for theirs. What's going on here? After Khatija died in 619, the Prophet remarried. During his lifetime, he had between 11 and 13 wives total, depending on how you count marriage ceremonies. Almost all of them were to cement peace treaties with conquered tribes. And at one of his marriages, the guests were hanging out. We kind of all do that at weddings, hang out, you know, enjoy. But he's a polite guy. He says, no, I'm not going to kick you out of my house. And they want to see the wife. They want to see the bride, you know, we're glad you're gonna let. So this revelation comes. And it says, if you want to chat with them, do so from behind a screen. Well, now, now let's use, first of all, we just use historical interpretation. We just noticed that this is a historically time-bound passage. It's addressing a specific moment in time. And now let's use a bit of independent reasoning. Do so from behind a screen. Here's the possibility. Put the screen in between, I'm the guy, you're the bride, put it between us. Right? And that's happened to me in lots of restaurants. You know, I come in and Dubai or wherever and boom, the screen goes down. Or put the screen on the woman. Right? The veil. Hey, there's a third possibility. It goes on me. I get to wear the veil. Right? And why is she wearing the veil? The guy's decided. Right? The guy's decided. Okay. So there are other passages to be sure that talk about dress and modesty, which enjoin both genders to be modest. Now let me come to this one. Terrorism. I was at a meeting of the Indian Society of International Law and I keep telling them to change their acronym from ISIL to something else. I get these emails, you know, from ISIL most. Right? Just change it. Just call it the society. Right? Put a little Indian flag. That would be really nice. But I was at this meeting of the Indian Society of International Law in Delhi a few years ago. And I hear that in Pakistan there are clerics saying that, and I want to be careful because this is on video, that clerics are saying, not me saying, that it is all right to kill a pregnant Israeli woman who's not in the IDF anymore because she will bear a child who will serve in the IDF. And I'm thinking, where on earth could you possibly justify this? So I learned from a lot from my special ops class and my Kansas University law students and they tell me when suspects are caught. Terrorist suspects are caught and interrogated by the FBI. There's a new director here and they're interrogated by the FBI. They're shown a copy of the Quran and say, where does it stay in here that it was all right to pull the suicide bombs and explode? Now most of them don't know. They don't have a clue. The FBI guys know it much better than they do. But if you press, you're going to get three passages. And these are the last three I'll mention and interpret before we break for questions. These are known as the sword verses. There was a sword dance recently in Saudi Arabia by some heads of state. And here's the three of them. And the first one is known as the jizya or tax verse. And here's what it says. Fight those of the people of the book who do not truly believe in God in the last day, who do not forbid what God and his messenger have forbidden, who do not obey the rule of justice until they pay the tax and agree to submit. Where's the weapon in that? First of all, fight. Fight does not immediately mean violence. We fight cases in court. We fight in faculty meetings, all nonviolent. The people of the book who are they at a minimum, they are Jews, Christians and Muslims because they've all been given a book, Old Testament, New Testament and the Holy Quran. I would argue using this, they include Buddhists, Dhammapada, they include Hindus, Vedas, they include Sikhs, Guru Granth Sahib in a modern interpretation of what people of the book mean. But putting that aside, those who do not truly believe in God in the last day will all of them pretty much do. Who do not forbid what God and his messenger have forbidden. Immoral behavior maybe? Who do not obey the rule of justice until they pay the tax? What's the tax all about? The tax known as the Jizya tax is a tax that conquering Muslim armies across the ages from 632 AD through the Ottomans. But particularly in the Umayyad and the Abbasid Caliphates would collect from non-Muslim populations in return for protection from the Muslim forces. I ask my Saudis students, so what is the Jizya tax rate? They say, we have no idea, we never heard of it, we don't collect it anymore. This is the ancient stuff. Point is, this is a tax enforcement provision that is historical. Sort of like reading an IRS statute from, you know, like 1950 or something that's fallen out of use. What about the second sword verse? And the last two are called the slaying verses. When the four forbidden months are over, wherever inside or outside the sanctuary in Mecca, that's the grand mosque, you find the polytheists kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them. But if they turn to God and maintain the prayer and pay the prescribed alms, let them go on their own way for God is most forgiving and merciful. And if any one of the polytheists should seek your protection, grant it to him so that he may hear the word of God. What sort of treaty could these polytheists make with God and his messenger anyway? What's that all about? How would that justify offensive terrorist operations? Well, the four forbidden months and the treaty, that's a big clue. Again, this is historically contextual passage around the years 619, 620, 621, 622 before the great migration from Mecca to Medina, the Hydra, when Jews, Christians, pagans, polytheists, all non-Muslims in Mecca who were not converting to Islam and who were not leaving the Muslims alone free to worship. The Meccan establishment, it's sometimes known, were persecuting Muslims driving them from their homes and not letting them worship in the Grand Mosque. And in that case, Allah said through the Archangel, it's permissible to fight them, even to kill them. The treaty was actually a peace treaty, was a truce that lasted for four months. And the worry was what happens when the peace treaty, the truce is over. If violence starts again and we're being driven. Now, what this is really about then is freedom of worship. Allah is saying, if you have to defend your faith and it's the last resort of violence, then you can do it. But again, it's historically contextual to those years. And now the last passage of the second of the slaying verses, fight in God's cause against those who fight you, against those who fight you. That's already defensive. But do not overstep the limits. We call that in public international law, the proportionality principle. God does not love those who overstep the limits. Kill them wherever you encounter them and drive them out from where they drove you out. For persecution is more serious than killing. Persecution is more serious. So it's again, the religious freedom, being persecuted for your religious faith. Hey, nobody drove extremists out from their homes. They drove people out of the World Trade Center, including about 187 of my wife's colleagues. So this passage doesn't work either. Okay? And if you do fight, if they do fight you, kill them, that's what disbelievers deserve. But if they stop, then God is most forgiving and merciful. Usually the first clause is quoted by a violent extremist leader. If they do fight you, kill them. That's what such disbelievers deserve. But they forget the rest of the sentence. But if they stop, then God is most forgiving and merciful. And in fact, that's a good place to end and to speak, to talk, to take questions and comments, because I started with Abismala in our limited intellect. We can't really know what God is. But Muslim scholars have 99 names for God, 99 attributes of God. And when my daughter was very small, I bought a beautiful blue pod with gold paint that has the 99 names by a Syrian artist. The most common name, most merciful, most compassionate. That's the authentic Islam. And the battle we're in now, again, is to stimulate and understanding of authentic from inauthentic Islamic teachings, using our minds, our reason, which the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran both strongly encourage us to do. So with that, thank you for your attention. I'm sorry I went over a few minutes. But I'm really happy to try and answer. I should have started by saying I'm very much a student of this field is a lot of great scholars across the ages, centuries who study this field. But it's really important that we try our best.