[Vision2020] The Big Scare Over Sharia Law

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

This was my radio commentary/column for this week.  I'm grateful to a local Muslim authority for checking it for errors.  The full version is attached.

Nick

THE BIG SCARE ABOUT SHARIA LAW

On October 8 Nevada Senate candidate and Tea Party darling Sharron Angle breathtakingly declared that two American cities were now living under Islamic sharia law. We should all be relieved that the one town she mentioned no longer exists. Frankford, Texas was annexed to Dallas in 1975.  A CNN reporter found only a church and a cemetery.  There was no sign of a mosque nor bomb-making equipment.

Angle’s second town was Dearborn, Michigan, which is indeed the home of 30,000 patriotic, law-abiding Arab Americans. The first wave of these immigrants were Lebanese Christians, and only later did Muslims from Yemen, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories arrive.  
In a letter to Angle, Dearborn mayor John O’Reilly explained to her that the first mosque was built in Detroit 100 years ago and a second mosque was erected to serve the faithful who worked in Henry Ford’s Model-T plant. 

As O’Reilly states: “Muslims have been practicing their faith in our community for 100 years without incident or conflict.” Mayor O’Reilly also pointed out that Muslims have been in America from its very beginnings. 

Many Africa slaves were Muslim, and Thomas Jefferson gave permission for his Muslim slaves to slaughter lambs for the celebration of Eid.  Jefferson studied the Qur’an very carefully after finding many references to Islamic law in Frieherr von Pufendorf’s "Of the Law and Nature and Nations," one of his law school text books.

A recent article in the University of Pennsylvania "Journal of Constitutional Law" (Spring 1999) concludes that “whether Jefferson’s views were affected at all by Islamic thought through the writings of European thinkers, his own readings of a translated Qur’an, or discussions with Muslim slaves, the fact remains that fundamental similarities exist between the American and Islamic constitutional systems” (p. 526). 

Early Muslim government was based on elections, broad deliberation (including women) and consensus, the protection of minorities, and appeal to the wisdom of experience and learning. While the emphasis on reasoned deliberation has not been completely lost, the rule of force dramatically came into the play with the assassination of the third caliph in A.D. 656. Autocratic or hereditary rule has persisted in most Muslim countries since then.

In an article entitled “Who’s Afraid of Sharia?” Sumbul Ali-Karamali lays out the six principles of Islamic law: (1) the right to life; (2) the right to the protection of family; (3) the right to education; (4) the right of religious freedom; (5) the right to the protection of property and access to resources; and (6) the right to the protection of human dignity.  

As Ali-Karamali declares: “Well, bless me, as a pledge-of-allegiance-reciting, California-raised Muslim girl, these six principles sound a lot like those espoused in my very own Constitution of the United States. Except that these were developed over a thousand years ago.”

In his screed before the Values Voter Summit in September, the now far-right Newt Gingrich cited the case of a family court judge in New Jersey who had ruled that Muslim practice allowed to man to have non-consensual sex with his wife. Gingrich neglected to mention that the decision was overturned “as seriously flawed” by a state appeals court, where the judges ruled the state’s rape laws trump religious laws and practices.

In his column “Sharia as New Red Menance?” Eugene Robinson reminds Americans that that Jewish law has been always been respected in civil matters.  He quotes a Jewish authority: “Every day Jews go before rabbinic law courts to arbitrate real estate deals, nasty divorces and business disputes.” 

Returning to the issue of non-consensual sex, there are many conservative Christians who believe that the husband has sovereign authority over his wife and that she must submit to him on all matters.  The minister of Moscow’s Christ Church does not believe that women should vote in political elections nor on church matters. 

Writing for Christ Church’s journal "Credenda Agenda" (vol. 3: nos. 9, 11), attorney Greg Dickison wrote that, "if we could have it our way,” a Bible-based society would require capital punishment for “kidnapping, sorcery, bestiality, adultery, homosexuality, and cursing one's parents.”  There would also be death for apostasy (Deut. 13.6-9), and if a woman touched a strange man’s genitals, the offending hand would be cut off (Deut. 25.11,12).

Interestingly enough, stoning as a punishment is not mentioned in the Qur’an, but it is of course called for in the Bible. Disobedient children are to be stoned in the town’s square (Deut. 21:18-21), and a law based on these verses was passed, but evidently never enforced, by our Puritan fathers in Massachusetts.  

There are only a small minority of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who want to enforce their laws in this draconian way.  According to Amnesty International, only Sudan, Saudia Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—5 percent of the world’s Muslim population—practice a strict form of shaira. 

American journalists are correct in comparing the current Islamophobia to the Red Scare of the 1950s, and of the fear and persecution of Catholics in 19th Century America.  Is there any hope that reason and tolerance can prevail in the anti-Muslim frenzy that the right-wing has stirred up?

The contrast with the early days of our republic is instructive. Even though the Muslim Barbary pirates had captured their first U.S. ship in 1784, the citizens of Chesterfield County, Virginia chose not to blame Muslims living among them. On November 14, 1785 they petitioned the state assembly as follows: “Let Jews, Muslims, and Christians of every denomination enjoy religious liberty, and don’t thrust them out lest we become our own enemies and weaken this infant state.” 

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.  
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