Breaking (Down) the Law - an Interview with Dr. Wes Thiessen

Dr. Wes Thiessen isn't just a great storyteller, he's a conflict resolution expert, and he's here to tell us about Sharia Law, its history, its real world function in Muslim communities, and why it shouldn't make anybody nervous.

Islam is not monolithic, and neither is the study of law. The Golden Rule is extremely important in most legal cases, and the way it's applied in most cases deserves credit, as we'll hear Wes explain.

Living and working throughout the "Muslim World," Dr. Wes has a lot of experience that we find useful for "understanding the other," and building better relationships across what many prefer to see as boundaries.

We also look at the legal background of the extremist groups that are causing trouble for Muslims and their neighbours all around the globe.

This interview continues on Patreon

You can WATCH this interview on YouTube

Connect with Dr. Wes on Instagram or Facebook, or check out his website: UnderstandingTheOther.com

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Other links for Islam in Alberta:

Al-Rashid Mosque, Edmonton

Islamic Information Society of Calgary

For other Islamic connections local to you, we'd be happy to connect you.

[00:00:11] Katie Dooley: Hi, Preston.

[00:00:12] Preston Meyer: Hi, Katie.

[00:00:14] Katie Dooley: I am very excited for today's episode of

[00:00:17] Both Speakers: The Holy Watermelon Podcast.

[00:00:21] Preston Meyer: That was not a great. We always try and sync up and it always fails over Google Meets.

[00:00:27] Katie Dooley: Because we're not together. But I am excited because we have Dr. Wes Thiessen here to talk about Sharia law and probably a bunch of other religious studies topics too, because he knows a lot of stuff. Welcome, Wes.

[00:00:41] Wes Thiessen: Well, thanks, Katie, I'm delighted to be here. This is so exciting to be able to meet with you and talk about these things.

[00:00:47] Katie Dooley: I mean, we like having religious conversations, and anyone who's willing to join us is a friend of ours.

[00:00:53] Wes Thiessen: I like having religious conversations, too. So it's going to be pretty exciting. And I don't very often have them with people that are outside of my current circles.

[00:01:06] Katie Dooley: Okay, well, this is going to be good. I'm just going to quickly read Dr Wes's bio so that we can get into the meat of it. Dr Wes Thiessen is a conflict resolution practitioner and a certified mediator. Born and raised in the city of Calgary. Dr Thiessen began his mediation training in BC following an undergraduate degree in psychology and theological studies and a master's in Historical Geography of the Ancient Near East, and studied in Jerusalem. He worked both inside and outside the justice system to resolve conflicts in many forms family, spousal, assault and property crime. He later completed a PhD in Islamic history after spending over another decade in North Africa. This life experience and education assist Wes in better understanding conflict with cultural and/or religious elements. In this practice, he assists families in conflict, employment conflict, and neighborhood disputes. He especially loves to help people resolve their differences to build better relationships with us. Wes has four children and five grandchildren and is also a part-time pastor of a rural church.

[00:02:10] Wes Thiessen: Katie, I should have read that whole thing over because it's actually outdated.

[00:02:14] Katie Dooley: Oh well, tell us what's the update?

[00:02:17] Wes Thiessen: I have six grandchildren, not just five.

[00:02:21] Katie Dooley: Congrats.

[00:02:21] Preston Meyer: Congratulations.

[00:02:23] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, the last one was born in September, so obviously that bio hasn't been updated since September.

[00:02:29] Katie Dooley: Well, now now it's updated. He has six grandchildren. Everyone. So first question Preston had is what was your master's and PhD?

[00:02:42] Preston Meyer: Yeah, I'm always curious about that sort of thing. What brought you here?

[00:02:46] Wes Thiessen: So yeah, the subject of my master's thesis a long time ago was called, it was called "The Altar of Burnt Offering in Light of Recent Archeological Excavations."

[00:02:59] Katie Dooley: Okay.

[00:03:01] Preston Meyer: Okay. Interesting.

[00:03:02] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, I spent two years. I spent two years studying in Jerusalem at the Institute of Holy Land Studies. If you look for it now, it's probably listed under the name Jerusalem University College. It's a graduate school that's located geographically on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, outside of the Old City walls, but in a very historical area. It is run by a board that is based, I think their charter comes out of Minnesota, but most of the administrative work, I think comes from the state of Illinois. But it's a graduate school that is run mostly by Americans but has an international student body, usually fairly small, but they have short-term programs and the longerterm programs. And I went there with the idea in mind that I was just going to spend a semester there, but ended up being there for two years because the learning that I experienced there just changed so much about my experience with the Bible. I went there on the suggestion of a professor of mine when I was doing my undergraduate work. He taught Old Testament studies, and he said that if I was thinking about working with the church, it would be excellent for me to go to the school for a semester to learn more about the land, language, and people of the Bible. And after six weeks, I decided to stay for a couple of years. And finding a topic for my master's research was just a matter of what's interesting for me. The program focused on history, archeology, language, Hebrew, and also archeology, and I went and participated in a dig for a few weeks in the land, and I was really interested in the intersection between what archeology discovered and how we understand the Old Testament, because there's always people who are looking for evidence to prove what they read is actually true. And I was looking more for what have we found and how does it change, how we understand what we read. And that's why I ended up with the topic that I did. Digs at the time were uncovering sometimes cultic objects, and it was helping us to better understand and interpret what we read in the Old Testament about the altar of burnt offering.

[00:05:24] Preston Meyer: I do love your angle that you're coming at it, looking to learn more about what you're reading, instead of forcing what you're reading onto what you're finding.

[00:05:34] Wes Thiessen: Well, I don't think I was always of that mindset though, so I think I experienced quite a bit of shift in that while I was living in Jerusalem. And as I was reading the texts and understanding our interpretation is like everything else, we filter what we read through what we already believe, and somehow we need to try and come back to the text with a little bit less bias, and see if it's possible for us to incorporate other possible interpretations, or at least relax our interpretation to the point where we can widen the circle a little bit, if that makes sense. Maybe some of your listeners understand what that means.

[00:06:26] Preston Meyer: I think so, we got some pretty clever listeners.

[00:06:30] Katie Dooley: Yeah. Our, uh, our listener base is all ready to, to learn, and they're very open. I don't think we'd attract anything else. And what about your PhD?

[00:06:41] Wes Thiessen: So my PhD is entitled "The Formation of the Mudawana."

[00:06:45] Katie Dooley: I don't know what that is.

[00:06:47] Preston Meyer: You're going to have to tell us more.

[00:06:51] Wes Thiessen: You can tell that that subject obviously is made for people who already have kind of an understanding of Islamic studies.

[00:06:59] Preston Meyer: That's the case for a lot of PhD work.

[00:07:03] Wes Thiessen: Yeah. I mean, there's not even a subtitle for my, my, my dissertation. So people have to at least know what the Mudawana is or, or be able to figure out what that word means. And the Mudawana is one of the two legal texts that's at the foundation of the Sunni classical school of Islamic law that was prevalent all across North Africa, which is the Maliki school. And just as in the way when people study under a particular PhD supervisor, they might be highly influenced by that particular supervisor. Maybe they will even be put into a particular box because of the person who they studied with. In the same way, in the early parts, in what we call it the formative period of of Islam, there were schools of thought. People were schooled by certain scholars and then by their disciples later on. And eventually these schools of learning became known as classical schools of Islamic law. And in Sunni Islam, there were four classical schools of Islamic law. Because I lived in the Muslim world, in North Africa, I was surrounded by people who had been versed in the Maliki school, and the Maliki school is simply named, like the other three schools, by the founder or what later Islamic scholars recognize as being the founder of the school. His name is Malik, and so it's called the Maliki school, just like we have the Shafi'i school, who is called after Shafi'i, and we have the Hanafi school, which is by Abu Hanifa, and so on. So the names of the schools are really named after people that they recognize as having founded or started or being the impetus for that particular school of thought. And the Mudawana is a text that eventually was gathered together, I suppose we can say, by people who followed the teachings of Malik, but were centered in the city of Kairouan in Tunisia, where I lived for 15 years. So I chose a topic based on the places where I lived, because I wanted to better understand the people around whom I was living. I wanted to know why do they believe the things that they believe? How was Islamic law formed? How did this law get created here in this particular place, and why did people follow this particular teaching? So the Mudawana is one of these books of law that was created in that area, caused me to ask these questions, and I wanted to know, how was this book made? So I started down some rabbit holes.

[00:09:52] Preston Meyer: Makes perfect sense. Learn about the people that you're with. That's half of the motivation behind the Holy Watermelon.

[00:09:58] Wes Thiessen: I'd love to taste that, by the way. Yeah. So that was that was a little bit about my dissertation. It's a little I don't know, it's it's a pretty deep rabbit trail like most dissertations. 

[00:10:12] Preston Meyer: Well, if it's not really long, is it even going to get really carefully observed.

[00:10:19] Wes Thiessen: Uh, yeah. I, you know, another scholar really encouraged me to try and publish my, my dissertation, but I knew that was going to be another project. As I try and decide to edit and decide, what do I want the focus of the book to be if I'm going to publish it. And because I never ended up going into teaching in academic circles, I didn't end up pursuing it. Even though I did start a couple of relationships with a couple of publishing houses. But I really don't think that it gets many hits. You can download it for free now from the university where it's archived, but like I say, it's great for people who have insomnia.

[00:11:01] Katie Dooley: Maybe we'll link it in our show notes and then people can read it.

[00:11:05] Preston Meyer: Yeah, that'd be great.

[00:11:06] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, sure.

[00:11:08] Preston Meyer: So I'm curious, have your studies in Islam affected the way you approach your Christian faith?

[00:11:14] Wes Thiessen: You know, I think, Preston, when I consider that, I would have to say that any interaction that I have with any other faith has impacted what I believe, really. I remember reading a book that somebody wrote about how the five pillars of Islam have changed my Christian faith. And I think that as you investigate other people's religious beliefs and their life and their practice, it's going to impact. It's going to influence how you think about your own. It's going to make you stop and think a little bit more about what is it that you do. Provided, of course, that you can just get over that little judgment piece. You know, a lot of a lot of people have this judgment piece that their religion, of course, is the right one and the best one. And, you know, I'm sure that a lot of your listeners are way beyond that. But until you can sit down and just have a conversation with another person because they're a person and not put them into the box of they believe something different than I do, therefore they don't have the same value that I do.

[00:12:24] Preston Meyer: Yeah, it's a struggle that a lot of people are still working with.

[00:12:28] Wes Thiessen: Let me give you one example about how studying or learning about Islam has impacted me. So if we talk about the five pillars of Islam, one of them is salat, which means prayer. And you know, there are different practices depending on what kind of Muslim you are, whether you're Sunni or Shia or Sufi or Ismaili or whatever your branch is. But in Sunni Islam, which is probably the branch of Islam which is most well known and quite well defined or boxed. In traditional Sunni practice, Muslims should pray five times a day. And I was just watching a movie the other day. Interestingly enough, somebody brought a drink. A waiter brought a drink to somebody who was at a in a lounge chair by a swimming pool at a hotel in Beirut. It was obviously morning because the waiter said, good morning. He hands him his drink and the guy is drinking the drink. And in the background you can hear the call to prayer. And I said, well, that was that was really poor scripting because the call to prayer happens before sunrise, and then it happens at noon. And so that period where he's lounging by the pool isn't a period when it would be expected that somebody would hear the call to prayer anyway.

[00:13:51] Preston Meyer: Maybe he's saying, good morning at 1158. Maybe.

[00:13:57] Katie Dooley: Preston.

[00:13:59] Preston Meyer: I gotta try. Right.

[00:14:01] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How can we make it work? Just when you stop to think about the fact that Muslims who are dedicated to what they believe will spend time performing particular acts of devotion in prayer on a five times a day is pretty committed. And they will do particular gesticulations with their body. You know, they have to bend and they have to kneel and they have to bow in their forehead, has to touch the floor. So there's there's a lot of guidelines that you have to follow in order for your prayer to be acceptable and for somebody to be that committed to do it. You can see that that religious belief is going to permeate a lot of who they are. And Christians who balk at the idea that I don't want to do something that's so prescribed and so mechanical. Kind of like the debate that might happen in in worship circles between liturgical churches and non-liturgical churches. You might say, well, Muslims, you know, they're just they're just performing something out of habit. But even for a person, any kind of person, to perform a religious action, even if it's not very well defined or prescribed five times a day religiously, if we can use that word, that's pretty committed, that's going to impact your daily life. It's going to change how you think and it's that's going to impact your beliefs. And so I was just challenged as a Christian to think about, well, do I pray? Okay. I don't pray in the same way that Muslims pray, but that's pretty dedicated prayer. Are we dedicated to what we believe to the same degree? So questions of reflection on my own Christian practice based on what I've seen experienced in the Muslim world. And when you hear the call to prayer, if you hear the call to prayer living in the Muslim world, that's also another reminder. You know, it's it's a part of everybody's life that surrounds you. You're a part of that community which has its positives and its negatives, because you're either in or you're out right, or you're out right. You're pretending you're in or you know, you're out and everybody knows you're out, and then you're really out.

[00:16:27] Katie Dooley: I feel like this is a weird question. What do non-Muslims do during call to prayer? Like, if you're a Canadian tourist visiting Dubai.

[00:16:35] Wes Thiessen: You just carry on doing whatever you're doing. It's like it's like the music playing at the at the shopping mall. You go to the shopping mall at Christmas time and it's Christmas carols. And you know, you don't believe in Christmas and so you just sort of ignore it. You carry on doing whatever you're doing, okay? But you could walk into a shop and the person who owns the shop isn't standing at the counter. He's, uh, at the back on his prayer carpet, performing his prayer. And you just wait there. You wait until he finishes and he comes back, and then life returns to normal.

[00:17:09] Preston Meyer: Have you ever joined in the prayer?

[00:17:13] Wes Thiessen: Um, so I have joined in the prayer in the sense of being present. Physically present. Muslims don't make it a habit in the circles that I was in. They don't make it a habit of inviting non-Muslims to perform the prayer with them. And so they would expect somebody to do the other pillar of Islam, which is the shahada, or the testimony of faith. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. They would wait until somebody makes this testimony of faith before they would invite them into prayer with them. So I've been physically present while people have been praying, but not being invited to pray with them. And at different parts of the Muslim world, non-Muslims, the practice of whether or not non-Muslims can even come into a place of prayer will change. So, for example, in Turkey, non-Muslims are permitted to enter provided that they're dressed modestly enough. But in Tunisia, where I lived, if you're not a professing Muslim, you're not allowed to come into the prayer hall at all. So you have to look into the mosque from the door of the mosque.

[00:18:20] Katie Dooley: Interesting. What's it like? I've we've talked about going to a Muslim service here, but I haven't looked into it. Would it depend on the dialoguingmosque or is it pretty open here?

[00:18:33] Wes Thiessen: They are very open in Canada. In fact, if you're looking for a mosque to visit in Edmonton, I can set you up with somebody there. I've got some friends who work in the mosques in Edmonton. If some of your readers or listeners are in Calgary, I can also connect them with a couple of mosques here in Calgary, where they would be welcome to go and visit, meet the Imam, ask questions. I find that the Muslim leaders in Canada are very open to telling people about what they believe and dialoguing with people about their faith, and there are some branches of Muslims here in Canada who actually do proactive open house days where they advertise open house at their mosque on a particular day, on a Saturday, and invite people to come and have conversation with them, see the mosque, do a tour, ask questions, that sort of thing.

[00:19:26] Katie Dooley: Yeah, I'd love those resources and we can put them on our social media and in the show notes.

[00:19:32] Wes Thiessen: Yeah. Okay.

[00:19:33] Katie Dooley: Now we do have a specific topic in mind for this interview, which we discussed with us. But because you're you have your PhD in Islamic studies, we want to talk about Sharia law today, because that's one of those topics that scares a lot of people and probably for no good reason. From what I know about it, it's not that scary.

[00:19:52] Wes Thiessen: I think you're right on the money.

[00:19:54] Katie Dooley: Okay. So how was Sharia law developed historically and how were these rules selected, sorted, established? You talked a little bit about the school you lived in. That sounds like it has its own rules and laws. Yeah, let's start there.

[00:20:16] Wes Thiessen: Sharia law is very different than most people in North America conceive of it as. And that is because of how our laws are organized in North America or in the West in general. There's been a completely different development of law in our societies. And so when we think about somebody else's system of law, we naturally take our own template and we just overlay it on what we think theirs must be. And the trouble is that you can't actually do that. You can't take Western law and the way that our laws are written and designed, and how our whole law system works, and lay that as a template on top of Islamic law, because they were formed at very different time periods and in different ways and for different purposes. First of all, I feel really inadequate talking about Sharia law and its development only because as you study anything to a deeper and deeper level, you start to realize how little you actually know about something. But I suppose I probably know more about it than most of your listeners. And when I told people in Tunisia that I was studying about Imam Sahnoun and the Mudawana, many people would say to me, oh, you probably know more about Islam than I do. And I would have to concede, well, maybe that's true. I'm not a practicing Muslim, but maybe I do more do know more about your your historical development. But Sharia law is really it's a system and it's not a code. In the West we have a code of laws. So for example, in Canada we even have a, you know, a legal document that's called the Criminal Code of Canada. And in that criminal code, it tells you what you're allowed to do or what you're not allowed to do. And if you do this thing that you're not allowed to do what the punishment is going to be. And it doesn't work like that in Islam, because in Sharia, Sharia is a system of how law impacts life. And like I said, I'm not the best person. So if people are listening to this, let them know that they should listen to other people's perspectives and that maybe they will get a deeper and a wider perspective, that they listen to other voices as well. And this is just, you know, just a sliver into looking at what the subject is. But Sharia law means that I'm going to go back even a little bit further, and I'm going to draw back in something else from my Old Testament studies this last Sunday when I was preaching to my congregation. It's Transfiguration Sunday this last Sunday. So we're on the 21st of February. That was what the 19th and Transfiguration Sunday ,they celebrate the transformation that Jesus Christ experienced on Mount Tabor when he took his three disciples up and to talk about Transfiguration Sunday, I also brought in the text from Exodus, which is when Moses was invited to go up the mountain where he was going to meet with God, and in that going up the mountain, Moses went up the mountain with Joshua. And he told the Israelites as he was going up the mountain, you have Aaron and Hur here who will help you as I go up the mountain. Well, why did he need to do that? He did that because he was telling them. Me, Moses, your judge, the person who is helping you decide whether you can do these things or you can't do things, I'm going to go away. But even though I'm gone, these two people are going to help you. Now, that's really useful if you know that information from Old Testament studies, because that idea is also found within Islam, that Islamic law is based around somebody who guides you, somebody who judges, somebody who teaches. Because most of Islamic law is based around the idea of somebody going to talk to the judge, knocking on the door and asking him, I've got this situation. Is it permissible for me to be able to do this, or is it permissible for me to be able to do that? And so a lot of Islamic law developed out of hypothetical situations or even real situations where people would bring their questions to the legal expert and they would ask the legal expert, is it permissible for me to divide my property in half so that my son can build on this property, even though the property was given to me by my father in law or something like that, and then the person who is making the legal opinion will draw on all of their experience, and other judgments that have been made will explain those, and then they will make a judgment. And so you, some of the listeners might remember somebody by the name of Salman Rushdie, who wrote a book called The Satanic Verses, and then there was a fatwa that was put out against Salman Rushdie. So a fatwa is like a legal ruling and in order for a legal ruling to be made properly within orthodox Sunni Islam, the person who is asking the question asks the question, and then the judge or the decider is going to have to go back, and they're going to have to see all of the times in Islamic history that they're aware of, that this particular topic has been brought up before, who the judges were, who ruled on something. And what they ruled on and why they ruled on it before they're able to make their judgment. And so basically they use precedent to be able to make modern decisions. But in addition to that, they also have to go by the Quran, which is the written expression of the direct word of God, revelation of God for Muslims from God through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, who then learned all of these things, and some of them were written down on scraps of bone, and some of them were written down on scraps of leather. Eventually, it was all recited and written down on scrolls and gathered. By the time of the fourth leader of the Muslim world, at least, this is the narrative that we understand about how the Quran develops. So the Quran is very important. This is one thing that Islamic law has to line up with. The second thing that Islamic law has to line up with is the Sunnah. And the word Sunni Muslim comes from the word sunnah. And Sunnah means the behavior or the actions or the life or the speaking of the Prophet Muhammad. So Muslims all recognize that God's direct revelation was given to Muhammad, and Muhammad then became the Messenger of God or the rasul of God. And this messenger lived out what God's law was more perfectly than anybody else did. And so his life and his sayings become a model or a template for Muslims to follow. So Islamic law must line up with the Quran, it must line up with the Sunnah. And then, depending on the Sunni school of jurisprudence that you belong to, there's two other parts of it as well. One is called the ismah and ismah means the consensus. And so many people, probably in Christian circles, would be familiar with the idea of consensus. If they come from a congregation that follows a consensus style, which is where everybody in the congregation, and for Muslims, this would be the senior leaders, where they would all sort of agree together. Yes, this is the right way. Yes, this is the good decision. Yes, this is the good thing to do. And then the last of the four considerations of Islamic law would be called in Arabic prius, which means analogical reasoning. An analogical reasoning becomes important because the Quran is a book that was revealed and then recorded at a specific period and context in time. But there are some subjects that the Quran doesn't deal with directly, and so in order for us to understand how the Quran relates to those things, like for example, using a computer, somebody might come to an Islamic judge and might ask the question, is it permissible for me to use a computer? Is it right or is it wrong? Can I use a computer? And so then the judge would go back and in their analogical reasoning, they're going to look for something in the Quran that talks about something similar to what the idea of a believer using a computer means now, and apply that information to the current situation. So we have these four different streams that any idea that you're asking about, or anything that you want to rule it on has to be filtered through the Quran, the Sunnah, the consensus of the leaders, and then analogical reasoning. Of the for this is a really long answer, Preston. Of the four Orthodox schools of classical Islamic thought, three of those schools follow those four as being the help that they need in order to determine legality of any particular question somebody will come to somebody with asking. However, there is one school of thought which, instead of following those four, only follows the first two, the Quran and the Sunnah. And what happens when you reduce the perspective when you're asking religious questions? When you reduce, when you reduce that perspective? If I can loosely say you become more narrow-minded and it is out of this school, this classical school, that we now have many more of them, of the extremist interpretations of Islam, because they only access the Quran and the Sunnah, and they have a very conservative view of interpreting the Quran and a very conservative view of interpreting the Sunnah as well. I'm not sure if I even answered the question, but I gave you a lot of information.

[00:30:33] Katie Dooley: I think you answered multiple questions in that answer that were coming up, so that's great.

[00:30:40] Preston Meyer: I'm looking at our list of questions and seeing that the next one has, in fact been answered. So the idea of what is criminal versus what is civil law is. It's a pretty soft line in between those two categories.

[00:30:59] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, I'm going to make a comment about that, Preston, without you even asking a question.

[00:31:03] Preston Meyer: I think you know what the question is. Go for it.

[00:31:06] Wes Thiessen: I think Islamic law, from my understanding, Islam touches on everything in life. It tells you about civil society. It tells you about politics. It tells you about social interactions. It tells you about your personal life with your spouse. It tells you about how to relate to your relatives. It tells you what happens when you die. It tells you when you should, when you should wash and how you should wash. It just covers everything. So to say that Shariah only covers criminal is not correct. And this might be one of the reasons why people in the West get concerned when the topic of Sharia law comes up, because Islamic law filters into everything that you do in society, it has something to say about everything. And if you can't find a specific answer, then you just go to this person who interprets the law for you and ask them, is it permissible for me to do this? And they'll give you the answer.

[00:32:08] Preston Meyer: Right? And it's really not terribly different from the large codex of laws that we have in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, that it does cover your civil stuff, your what we would call criminal activity. So it's interesting to see the parallels there that it's so different from what we are familiar with today.

[00:32:29] Katie Dooley: Well and we have this conversation last episode press and the difference between Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy and I think that's Judaism and Islam are very much orthopraxic religions where what you do really matters. Is that fair?

[00:32:46] Wes Thiessen: Definitely, definitely. Yes.

[00:32:50] Preston Meyer: So how is the law typically enforced in communities where it's the predominant way of life?

[00:32:58] Katie Dooley: I'd also even add to that what does it look like in Muslim communities in Canada? To compare.

[00:33:05] Preston Meyer: Yeah.

[00:33:06] Wes Thiessen: You're going to need another guest to ask about the Canadian Muslim communities, because I haven't lived in Canada long enough understanding what I do about Islam or its communities to know how they cope with it. And I'm not an insider, so I'm not going to have those answers either. I could connect you with somebody if you'd like, but but that question, how is Islamic law governed today in the Muslim world differs depending on where you are in the Muslim world. It's not the same across the board as you probably would have guessed. And that difference is dependent on the region of the world and the history and the current government in that particular region. So. You know, the Muslim world is not homogenous. Sorry to break somebody's bubble. Muslims themselves are also not homogenous, just as in the same way there's all sorts of Christians. There's all sorts of Muslims. And meeting one Muslim doesn't mean that you have met everyone else and that you understand everything about everybody else. I learned this quite quickly in Tunisia, because even marital customs differ from one area of Tunisia to another. And so going to a wedding in the city where I lived didn't mean that you knew what people would do at a wedding in another city of the same country. In this in the same reference frame of reference, where you are in the Muslim world is going to change how Islamic law is regulated. So after the breakup of the Turkish Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, there was a breakup by international powers of taking those that region and dividing it up and putting it under mandates by other countries. So the region that I was in, in North Africa was under French rule, including Tunisia and Algeria, and the Italians took over Libya. And I think the British Mandate was in Palestine and in Egypt, and the French were in Syria and in Lebanon. And those Western nations had a huge influence on what happened in civil law in those countries. And so because they went there and like, for example, there was a, you know, a almost, you know, Arabs would call this like an occupation. But the French colonized Tunisian Algeria. They actually dealt with them both differently, to one point where the nation of Algeria was actually considered France. It was French territory, whereas Tunisia was like a protectorate or under colonial power by the French. The French would bring their law. And I'm only speaking about these areas because I know these specific geographical areas better than others. But the French brought their civil law, and they would regulate what was happening in Tunisia at that time period by French civil law. And when the Tunisians gained independence in 1956, much of the French civil law continued to be practiced in the country. Whereas now Tunisian law is basically based on French civil law, it's not based on Sharia. Now there are other countries in the Muslim world like Afghanistan and Pakistan and even further afield, where they didn't have this same influence by their colonial powers, and so their traditional laws would have carried over a lot more than in other places. So now in Tunisia, they don't talk so much about Sharia as they do about what's the law? What does the law say? Uh, this is French civil law now morphed into something modernized in Tunisia. And then depending on how each government, how progressive they are, uh, how interested they are in trying to reform something or move things in what they believe is a modernizing way, they will completely change the legal system. And so when the revolution happened in 2011, in Tunisia, there was a religious party that came in and they wanted to rewrite the constitution, and they wanted to rewrite the Constitution in more of a religious milieu. They didn't want to institute Sharia law as part of civil law, but they wanted to emphasize that their current form of law could be more Islamicized than what it had been because of the French influence. So that's a partial answer to your question. But I want to push the issue a little bit more, because I know a little bit more about Islamic law than I think that the two of you do. And sometimes when you don't know about something, you don't actually know what questions to ask, right? You don't know what you don't know. And so I want to talk for a minute about something called hadd punishments. And it's, um. It had punishment is kind of like you can sort of relate to it. If you understand the Old Testament idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, right? If he stole this from me, then I should be able to get this from him, right? If they murdered somebody in my family, I should be able to murder somebody in their family. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And when people talk about Sharia law in the West, they get they get this really concerned sense because it means all of a sudden, if somebody accidentally does somebody kill somebody, then the only way that we're going to get this taken care of is by revenge, by killing somebody else in their family. And the other famous ones that a lot of people in the West are familiar with is if you steal something, then the punishment is that we're going to cut off your hand. Right. And if one hand is gone already and you're still stealing, we'll cut off your other hand. And then they move to the feet. And eventually you might have somebody with no hands and no feet. And the idea behind that, I think, is, is the concept. If you're missing a hand, it's going to be much more difficult to steal. But what people don't realize is that cutting off somebody's hand when they steal something is considered a hadd punishment and hadd actually means like a border, an end, a maximum. So it would be the equivalent in our code of the maximum penalty that when somebody comes before the law, if they get convicted of drunk driving, I don't know what. Does anybody know what the maximum penalty is for drunk driving now in Canadian courts?

[00:39:53] Katie Dooley: No, but I can Google it.

[00:39:56] Preston Meyer: I've while she Googles it, I've always understood that it as exactly that, that the maximum punishment is this thing. When talking about the whole eye for an eye thing in the Hebrew Bible, where it's this is a new law, a new limitation on what was before a situation of revenge, where, yeah, sure, he stole my sheep and now I get to kill his family. Nope. That's way too extreme. You get exactly what you lost.

[00:40:24] Wes Thiessen: That's exactly right, Preston. That's exactly what the Islamic idea is, that there is a boundary on that and hadd. Another form of the word hadd, a cognate of it in Arabic is hudud, and it means boundary, like the boundary between Canada and the United States. And so a hadd punishment is giving you a maximum. This is as much as you can have, and no more. But the idea also in practice is that we don't go for the maximum. That's not what we start with. Usually we start with something much, much less than that. Because the idea behind Islamic law at its heart, is actually the idea of reform, that we want to change the individual, that we want the impact of what we're going to do to have a positive outcome, and so that our society is going to be better. And the best understanding that I have of this in a modern context is, is what happens in First Nations communities when people are convicted of something, that they bring a circle around them, of leaders in the community, and that circle is there to try and help bring positive impact and positive change on the person who's responsible for the crime.

[00:41:42] Preston Meyer: Yeah, that's an excellent parallel. Katie, did you find what you're looking for?

[00:41:46] Katie Dooley: I did. A summary conviction carries a two years in prison. An indictment has a maximum of 14 years. And if you kill someone, you can get life in prison.

[00:41:56] Wes Thiessen: Wow. Yeah. But I'm sure if you have any experience or you've heard stories, people are convicted of drunk driving. And, you know, they don't. They don't spend two years in jail. Yeah, they might get their license taken away from them.

[00:42:12] Preston Meyer: And even that's not a sure thing.

[00:42:14] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, yeah.

[00:42:16] Preston Meyer: So that principle of, you know, hopefully we can get them to reform is present in our tradition too. Though, it feels just a tiny little bit different because we have different expectations of what we count as the other. Plus, we like telling stories of people getting their hand cut off.

[00:42:35] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, but like the media, people are always attracted to the extreme. They're always attracted to the bizarre. And we like to lift those up as we think of them as being the norm when they're not. You know, you hear about somebody who's stoned in Afghanistan or somebody who's executed in Saudi Arabia. These are these are not the norm. They do happen, but they're not the norm.

[00:43:03] Katie Dooley: The stories of people going to their leaders to ask how to deal with their mother in law. Never make the news.

[00:43:10] Wes Thiessen: That's right. Yeah.

[00:43:12] Katie Dooley: Going to their mediator? Wes.

[00:43:17] Wes Thiessen: Thanks for the plug, Katie.

[00:43:19] Katie Dooley: Important work, but probably not newsworthy.

[00:43:22] Wes Thiessen: Exactly right.

[00:43:23] Katie Dooley: Unfortunately. So that is a good context to put it in. What are. Do you know any interesting or surprising laws that Sharia has? The example I put in our questions you might have read. We did an episode, a bonus episode on abortion and abortion is permissible in Islam if it benefits the mother and the family. But if you're a devout Catholic, that probably looks pretty barbaric. So that one surprised me.

[00:43:52] Wes Thiessen: So, you know, if you read a compendium of Islamic law, which is similar to the book that I studied for my PhD dissertation and just, you know, a disclaimer out there, I didn't read the entire book. It's so long. And but I looked at sections of it and I translated a very small portion of it. It's very intense. And I'm not a specialist in Islamic law. But when you look at those compendiums, they will all have very similar section titles. And those section titles relate to the really important aspects of life that Muslims in the formative period of Islam were dealing with. And so, for example, at that point in Islam, the religious expectations of prayer were beginning to be codified. I don't like the word codified, but sort of formed. And what people were expected to do. And it changes again from one classical school to another classical school, like, for example, the way that you kneel and whether or not you have your back feet so that they're both equally on the carpet, or if you have one foot on top of the other foot, which foot that should be, whether it's the right foot that should be on the left foot or vice versa. And then when you stand up, there's also a discrepancy between two schools of thought, of how your hand position should be when you're standing, whether both of your hands should be overlapped on on top of each other, on your belly, close to where your belly button is, or if they should be down at your side. And so each particular school of law will have a different form that's important for them. And these compendious chapters that they have that are relevant to the time of Muslims in the formative period of Islam. One of them, for example, that is always curious for people is about purification. Because for Muslims, before they pray, they go through a ritual purification to make themselves clean in order to enter into the mosque and to perform prayer. And as most Westerners I think probably know, when you go into a mosque, the first thing you do is you take your shoes off and you leave your shoes at the entrance to the mosque because nobody goes into the prayer space in your shoes. And this comes simply from the, the background that people when they came into a space to pray, during the time of early Islam, people wore open shoed, open-toed shoes or sandals. Their feet would get dirty because they were in a dusty space. Islam, you know, it's it's formative areas in the region of Saudi Arabia and and the Middle East. So it's hot, people are sweaty, it's dusty. And you take your sandals off before you come in, and then you go and you wash. And washing was really important actually to make sure that people were clean. And the washing would include the area around their feet, up to their knees, depending on the particular school you come from, and then carrying your hands over your head with some water to be able to wash that, and then around your ears and, and in your nose and around your mouth. Because with your ears, your nose and your mouth, you're actually cleaning the orifices of your body that takes things in sound and smells and speech and food. And so there is a figurative purification, but also a literal purification. We're cleaning the dust off, but we're also metaphorically cleaning the parts of our bodies, our faces, our eyes, the senses that bring things into our bodies. And then, of course, your hands and up to your elbows. And in different schools they will have different regulations about how many times you have to do this. And I think for people from the West, this is one of those things that's interesting or surprising. Why is it that there is so much, maybe you could say perseveration on this kind of a ritual purification, and it's really important to understand what the background is and the context to be able to bring you to a place where you can see, well, why did this develop and and why was this important? And now tradition has carried this on. And tradition is extremely important within Islam because as you can see, when I talked about the Quran and the Sunnah, which is what the prophet did, that tradition of what the prophet did is very, very important for people to follow because they recognize that as being the best way. And so they want to make sure that they imitate the best way.

[00:48:58] Preston Meyer: Yeah, I think it's interesting that different schools of thought have different precise rules on the exact method of what counts as purification that somebody went to, the one who gets to make the judgment. And he said, you got to be really clean. And somebody went to a different judge and said, you got to be really, really clean. And apparently that's different. And it's of course, became more detailed.

[00:49:24] Wes Thiessen: Right. It's important to remember, too, that those schools developed in different regional areas, um, around a personality. And there's, there's, you know, uh, of course, academic argument amongst scholars as to whether or not it developed by a region or if it developed around a personality. And so that debate is still ongoing about the formation of Islamic law, but geographically and by those schools, you can see that they moved in this direction. And maybe in the same way that language develops, because we have regional accents as a result of language developing in one area differently than it does in another. We have a similar thing when Islamic law developed that it formed in a particular way and this particular region like this, for this reason, and it formed somewhere else for this reason. And there there wasn't the same. You couldn't just Google or or, you know, do a VoIP call to somebody to check with them about how they dealt with this. And so you get different schools moving in different directions, generally the same. But you know, some some details that are different.

[00:50:33] Preston Meyer: Yeah. Dealing with back to specifically cleanliness. It's going to feel a little different in the jungle versus the desert. I feel like that that question of geography versus personality, I feel like uh, depending on which aspects you're looking at, you're looking at a combination of the two.

[00:50:53] Wes Thiessen: Yes.

[00:50:53] Katie Dooley: I think I'm going to combine these last two questions. So obviously talking about Sharia law, I think we have to talk about ISIS and the Taliban. But also people are scared of Sharia law. And we're seeing a lot of Christian nationalism, especially in the States. But here as well, what should we actually be scared about?

[00:51:13] Wes Thiessen: You know, I think if I stop and think about that for a little while, I might actually be more scared about Christian nationalism than I am about Sharia law.

[00:51:22] Katie Dooley: I would in North America. I absolutely would be.

[00:51:25] Wes Thiessen: Yeah, yeah. But that said, I've also travelled to other parts of the Muslim world. I, you know, I was in, uh, eastern Turkey and northern Iraq in 2019, and I went back to northern Iraq this last August and September, and I went because I was distributing eyeglasses to Muslim. Well, actually, not not Muslim necessarily, to refugees and to internally displaced peoples. And it was especially poignant to me in 2019 when I was in a refugee camp in Turkey and I met some I met this guy there who had heard that I had been around and wanted me to come and help his uncle, and I met him at outside of barbershop, and so I made an agreement that I'd come and see his family in a day or two, and they were living in a refugee camp. That they had been forced out of the region that they were in because of ISIS and the family got special treatment because this uncle that I had come to see was handicapped, and because of his handicap, he was given the best housing in the refugee camp, which was a cement box. It was a building with four walls and a roof, but it was a cement shell. And people in North America would just recognize it as you know, this is a building that's in development. But and it wasn't very big, you know, maybe like somebody large living room. Well, I shouldn't say large, an average-sized living room in North America. And they had carpets on the floor and we were welcomed in. I was with a couple of friends, and they had pillows around the corners for us to sit on to make us more comfortable. And the door didn't shut all the way, so you could see through the crack in the door what was going on in the courtyard outside. Or at least, you know, a sliver of activity. And there was a washroom that was connected to this building. But again, it was just four walls and then a Turkish toilet, if people knows what those are in the floor. That was and this was, this was the deluxe accommodations. Everybody else was in tents. And I could see while I was sitting in that room through the crack in the door, people were going back and forth, lots of movement, back and forth, going out of the yard and back into the yard, and people coming back into the yard carrying bags. And I could sort of tell what was in the bags. And then I sort of figured out what was going on. And a few minutes later, they brought in this enormous silver tray decked out with roast chicken and lots of food. And I knew that the amount of money that they had spent in order to try and bring me a meal that they thought was worthy of who I was as their guest, completely unnecessary in my mind, but that the hospitality in that region of the world is just unbelievable. And the honor that they give to guests puts us to shame. I'm just trying to create a little bit of a context in order to set up what I'm about to describe, when you talk to these people who have been displaced about some of the experiences that they've gone through and what it's like now. Your heart breaks and there's there's no words that you can say that bring any kind of a sense of empathy or good feeling to this person as they describe. We were living in our home, Christians and Muslims together in the same village, getting along fine, no problem for centuries. And all of a sudden this group comes in and they tell us that we have a choice to make right here and right now, that we can either bow to ISIS and sign on to what their theology is so we can choose their theology at that moment, or we're welcome to leave our own home and they will occupy it. Or, uh, we can pay a tax. I don't even know if the tax was instituted by that time in ISIS, when they were making their way across this particular swath of Syria. And, of course, because it's my home. I don't want these people here, and I'm going to do whatever I can in order to protect my family and my my home but the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to tell them, get out. This is my house. You don't belong here. Only a couple of minutes later to see my brother's head rolling on the floor beside me, helped me make the decision that I was going to leave with the rest of my family because my life was worth more to me than staying in that home and almost wanting to be sick. When you hear this kind of a story where the ideology of ISIS comes and forces people to do things that are inhumane. Now I say that because I also want to make sure that I honor any of my Muslim brothers and sisters as brothers in humanity that might be listening to this, to say that these actions do not represent Islam, they represent an extremist form of Islam. And I hope I've set that up a little bit by talking about those classical schools and saying that there was one particular stream that had a much narrower interpretation, where they only used the Quran and they only used what they understand as the traditions of the prophet. And, and over the centuries, that was like 800 years ago when that was solidified. Over the centuries, they have had even more extremist and conservative interpretations, where it's developed into Wahhabism, which is the modern term that's used to understand the theology of the people who follow this very conservative form of interpretation of Islam. More and more interpretation comes out of power and control, and these forces change people's ideology, so much so that they're missing the main idea of what this is about. And that Islam. Now, if you talk to you, talk to scholars, you will understand that Islam is a is a difficult word, as many words within Islam are actually difficult to understand what their etymology and their background is, they've been borrowed from other languages or they've come in from other ideas. But one of the roots behind Islam is salam, which develops into the other cognate salam. Some people might be familiar with that word salam, which is also related as a Semitic language to the Hebrew word shalom, which people are more familiar with, meaning peace. And that is Islam in the minds of many people who are practicing Muslims, is a religion of peace and not a religion of war and not a religion of extremism. And yet, like Christianity, which is also understood by many as being a Christian, a religion of peace has also developed into places of extreme conflict. Easy for us to turn to the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and what's gone on for centuries. So much conflict now that if you go to Ireland and you visit people and talk to them, they're some of the people will say, I don't even know what we're fighting about anymore. And this unfortunately, this happens with the human race. We get caught up in things. We lose our perspective. We miss the main idea because we're so focused in on trying to prove that we are right, that we're the holders of truth, and that we're the ones that get to decide who else is right and who else is in and going to other countries and learning about other cultures and languages and other faiths. All that's done for me is to expand my mind and help me realize that people live differently because they've been brought up in a different context, in a different place. Does that mean that what I believe or how I live my life is better than theirs? No, it just means that it's different. You know, I still have very firm beliefs of of spiritual value and nature, but I have come to the point where I respect and honor other people in the beliefs that they've chosen. And there is so much that we have in common between ourselves and the Muslim community. I would really encourage Christians, if they don't know Muslims, to go and seek one out and just say, hey, I've never met another Muslim before and and I'd like to I'd like to just meet one because I want to know more about Muslims. Why don't we want to know more about somebody?

[01:00:40] Katie Dooley: Uh, Wes, one last question for you. Is there anything you want to promote? I know you have a business. I know you do some volunteer work that you alluded to. Where can people find you? Pitch yourself.

[01:00:53] Wes Thiessen: Well, thanks for that opportunity, Katie. So I work as a mediator. I love to help people resolve their conflict. Uh, I work in all forms of conflict. Uh, especially love to work with couples that are struggling in their relationship, but they don't want to go down the road of divorce. Although I do do divorce mediation as well. Uh, I love to help couples figure out what their relational difficulties are and try to resolve those. I also work with organizational conflict. So if there are churches or even mosques where they have conflict within their organization and looking for somebody to facilitate something or help them untangle what the conflict means, they can always reach out to me. My my website is understandingtheother.com. Uh, and you can email me if somebody wants to send me an email. [email protected]. And I also mentioned my eyeglass ventures in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. I might be making a trip to Tunisia this year, I'm not sure. Still in the planning stages and people in Iraq have invited me to come back again and maybe do an eyeglass clinic in the region of Mosul or the Sinjar, which is the region that ISIS came to and drove so many Yazidis out of that region. So I'm thinking about that as well. And if people are interested in what I do with eyeglasses and eyeglass distribution, they can find me on Instagram at 2020. So that's 2020. The word vision v-i-s-i-o-n and the number four and the word refugees @2020vision4refugees. That's my Instagram handle. People are welcome to connect with me there, follow or even send a message if they've got questions.

[01:02:38] Katie Dooley: Awesome. Thanks, Dr. Wes and Preston, what about us?

[01:02:42] Preston Meyer: Well, we've got a little bit of merch ourselves. I don't think we have eyeglasses on our list, but maybe one day we've got our Spreadshop. Uh, we've got a great online community on Discord, as well as Facebook and Instagram and Patreon. If you want to support our show, Patreon is the way to go and thanks for joining us!

[01:03:06] Both Speakers: Peace be with you!