Individual Muslims may have their own peaceful, internal jihads of spiritual and personal growth—but that shouldn’t be used to obscure the real threat of violent jihad. Apologists focus on the former in order to make sure we never learn about the latter. Islamic law defines jihad to mean “war against non-Muslims” and “warfare to establish the religion,” and it is the traditional, sharia meaning of the term that has been a consistent part of Islamic doctrine from Muhammad until today.
LIE #4
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“MUSLIMS DON’T ACTUALLY SEEK TO LIVE UNDER SHARIA, LET ALONE IMPOSE IT ON OTHERS; THERE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS OF IT ANYWAY.”
“In a broad sense, Sharia law is the code of conduct or religious law of Islam. It is a wide-ranging system that encompasses crime, politics, economic, and personal matters such as sexuality, diet, hygiene, prayer, and fasting. . . . [T]here is no one document that outlines a universally agreed upon use of Sharia. This leads to many different interpretations.”
—Council on American-Islamic Relations
“There are so many varying interpretations of what sharia actually means that in some places, it can be incorporated into political systems relatively easily.”
—Steven A. Cook, Council on Foreign Relations
In an effort to appear tolerant and understanding of Islam, the George Soros–funded Center for American Progress enlisted former Muslim Student Association activist Wajahat Ali to draft a seven-page paper titled “Understanding Sharia Law.” In it, Ali writes, “There is no one thing called Sharia. A variety of Muslim communities exist, and each understands Sharia in its own way. No official document, such as the Ten Commandments, encapsulates Sharia. It is the ideal law of God as interpreted by Muslim scholars over centuries aimed toward justice, fairness, and mercy.” He went on to conclude: “In reality, Sharia is personal religious law and moral guidance for the vast majority of Muslims. Muslim scholars historically agree on certain core values of Sharia, which are theological and ethical and not political. Moreover, these core values are in harmony with the core values at the heart of America.”
Lawyer and author Qasim Rashid, writing in the Huffington Post, repeatedly stresses that sharia seeks a society “based on justice, pluralism and equity for every member of that society” and that sharia would not allow these dictates to be imposed on “any unwilling person.”
First, let’s understand what sharia is. It is a codification of the rules of the lifestyle (or deen) ordained by Allah, the perfect expression of his divine will and justice. Therefore it is the supreme law over everything and everyone, regardless of where that individual may live. There isn’t a corner of life that sharia doesn’t touch; it governs and dictates everything.
Sharia comes from four principal sources: the Quran, the Sunna or Hadith, Ijma, and Qiyas. By now you’re already familiar with the central, sacred text of Islam and the example and practices of Muhammad’s life as relayed in the oral traditions of the Hadith. Ijma means “consensus” and consists of the prevailing opinion of Muslim scholars. Qiyas is reasoning by analogy, which establishes new precedents in areas where the Quran and Hadith are unclear.
“Islam, it is generally acknowledged, is a complete way of life,” writes Imran Ahsan Kahn Nyazee, a leading professor of Islamic law at the International Islamic University Islamabad, “and at the core of the code, is the law of Islam. . . . No other sovereign or authority is acceptable to the Muslim, unless it guarantees the application of the laws (shariah) in their entirety. Any other legal system, howsoever attractive it may appear on the surface, is alien for Muslims and it is not likely to succeed in the solution of their problems: it would be doomed from the start.”
This is the root of political Islam, or what we are calling Islamism. It is the belief shared by millions of Muslims that sharia is the answer to the world’s ills and represents the holistic worldview of Muhammad and the Quran. It’s not surprising then that a 2013 Pew poll of nearly 40,000 Muslims in 39 countries demonstrated widespread support for the adoption of sharia law.
Support for Sharia
Percentage of Muslims who favor making sharia the official law in their country
—Afghanistan
99
—Iraq
91
—Palestinian Territories
89
—Malaysia
86
—Pakistan
84
—Morocco
83
—Bangladesh
82
—Thailand
77
—Egypt
74
—Indonesia
72
—Jordan
71
—Russia
42
That overwhelming numbers of Muslims should want to live under Islamic law should come as no surprise, especially as we learn more about Islam’s goals and underpinnings. For Muslims, living under the law (deen) of Allah—which encompasses everything from family law to business and transactional law to international law and more—is a defined religious imperative. In Islam: A Sacred Law: What Every Muslim Should Know About the Shariah, author Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the center of the Ground Zero mosque controversy, describes what Islamic law is:
Since Shariah is understood as a law with God at its center, it is not possible in principle to limit the Shariah to some aspect of human life and leave out others. . . . The Shariah thus covers every field of law—public and private, national and international—together with enormous amounts of material that Westerners would not regard as law at all, because the basis of Shariah is the worship and obedience to God through good works and moral behavior. Following the Sacred Law thus defines the Muslim’s belief in God.
Rauf is what the media describes is a “moderate.” He matter-of-factly describes that Islamic law traverses the distance between personal religious observance or theology and laws that affect others in the public sphere. As we’ll see, our Constitution comes into conflict with Islamic law in numerous places.
In Shari’ah: The Islamic Law, renowned Muslim professor Abdur Rahman Doi explains why Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere feel pressure to want to live according to sharia:
The Holy Qur’an has warned those who fail to apply the Shari’ah in the following strong words: “And if any fail to judge by the light of what Allah has revealed, they are not better than those who rebel.” (5:50) “And if any fail to judge by the light of what Allah has revealed, they are no better than wrong-doers.” (5:48)
“And if any fail to judge by the light of what Allah has revealed, they are no better than unbelievers.” (5:47)
There’s one thing that unites every single one of the world’s Islamic terror groups—from Boko Haram to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State; from Hezbollah to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps; and from the Muslim Brotherhood to freelance jihadists plotting murder in America: the desire to make sharia the law of the land everywhere on earth. You’d be hard-pressed to find a letter, press release, tweet, or Facebook post from any militant Islamic group that doesn’t mention the imperative of imposing sharia, first in Muslim-controlled lands, and then across the globe.
The pronouncements of other Islamist leaders suggest that the spread of sharia is indeed the clear goal. When ISIS declared a Caliphate in 2014, it declared its mission as “compelling the people to do what the Sharia (Allah’s law) requires of them concerning their interests in the hereafter and worldly life, which can only be achieved by carrying out the command of Allah, establishing His religion, and referring to His law for judgment.”
In 2002, Osama bin Laden declared:
Muslims, and especially the learned among them, should spread Shari’a law to the world—that and nothing else. Not laws under the “umbrella of justice, morality, and rights” as understood by the masses. No, the Shari’a of Islam is the foundation. . . . In fact, Muslims are obligated to raid the lands of the infidels, occupy them, and exchange their syst
em of governance for an Islamic system, barring any practice that contradicts Shari’a from being publicly voiced among the people, as was the case in the dawn of Islam. . . . They say that our Shari’a does not impose our particular beliefs upon others; this is a false assertion. For it is, in fact, part of our religion to impose our particular beliefs upon others. . . . Thus whoever refuses the principle of terror against the enemy also refuses the commandment of Allah the Exalted, the Most High, and His Shari’a. . . . And we also stress to honest Muslims that, in the midst of such momentous events and in this heated atmosphere, they must move, incite, and mobilize the Muslim umma to liberate itself from being enthralled to these unjust and apostate ruling regimes, who themselves are enslaved to America, and to establish the Shari’a of Allah on earth.
Even as it was being courted by the Obama administration the Muslim Brotherhood was honest about its long-standing goals for installing sharia worldwide, declaring in 2010, “The Muslim Brotherhood is an international Muslim Body, which seeks to establish Allah’s law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion. . . .”
Of course, none of this is new. Pakistani Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Islamic organization in Asia, gave a 1939 speech titled “Jihad in Islam” in which he spoke clearly about the goal of installing Islamic law worldwide:
The objective of the Islamic “Jihad” is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule. Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution. . . . No revolutionary ideology which champions the principles of the welfare of humanity as a whole instead of upholding national interests, can restrict its aims and objectives to the limits of a country or a nation. The goal of such an all-embracing doctrine is naturally bound to be world revolution.
Like so many prominent jihadists, Maududi was no outcast. He was not only one of the most influential imams of the twentieth century; he was also an internationally recognized Islamic scholar who wrote scores of books, including The Meaning of the Qur’an, a popular single-volume commentary widely available in America. At the same time, he was a fierce self-described revolutionary who, in no uncertain terms, sought the overthrow of all non-Muslim forms of government worldwide.
Nearly every article or news report in the Western media about the Islamic State in Iraq or Syria, Boko Haram in Africa, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt remarks on the application of sharia in these places—most often in the context of horrific and medieval sharia-mandated punishments for criminal offenses. Whenever these atrocities are mentioned, we hear Islamic law described as “severe versions of sharia.” The journalists and so-called experts want us to believe there are gradations of Islamic law: the bad guys force the “severe” kind on unwilling populations, while “moderate,” or even “liberal,” interpretations are just as valid and practiced by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims.
But we know that’s not the truth. There is only one version of sharia—and a great many Muslims around the world will not stop until we are all living under it.
LIE #5
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“AMERICA IS SAFE FROM SHARIA LAW.”
“Sharia is as unthreatening to the US legal system as the ideas in the Old Testament. Yet bigoted hysteria is fueling legislation that actually undermines our courts.”
—The Nation
“There is no evidence that Islamic law is encroaching on our courts.”
—American Civil Liberties Union
On the front of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., are emblazoned the words “Equal Justice Under Law.” Though our justice system is not always perfect, we strive to make sure our courts hold every individual, regardless of his or her background, equally accountable to the laws enshrined in our Constitution and passed by our elected representatives. So what if an American judge sided with foreign religious law that insisted on inequality between believer and nonbeliever instead of our own legal codes? What if you were subjected to an entirely separate shadow legal system?
It admittedly seems like a fevered delusion that this could ever happen in the United States, but it’s closer than you think. Islamic sharia law has been slowly integrating itself into American society—and our justice system.
There is a frantic scramble on the left to respond to those warning of the dangers of American sharia with two tactics: calling people “conspiracy theorists,” and calling them “Islamophobes.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) manages to do both.
The ACLU issued a report on sharia in America with the less-than-reassuring title “Nothing to Fear.” In it they assert that “there is no evidence that Islamic law is encroaching on our courts.” Cases involving sharia, they claim, are simply “routine legal matters.” Those who have a problem with sharia influencing American justice are automatically “anti-Muslim advocates” whose goal is not to preserve liberty, but “to denigrate an entire faith system and to deny its followers the same access to the judicial system enjoyed by citizens of other creeds.”
Attorney, law professor, and self-styled sharia expert Abed Awad also wants everyone to rest easy, writing in the Nation that we should get used to sharia as just another benefit of globalization:
The true story of Sharia in American courts is not one of a plot for imminent takeover but rather another part of the tale of globalization. Marriages, divorces, corporations and commercial transactions are global, meaning that US courts must regularly interpret and apply foreign law. Islamic law has been considered by American courts in everything from the recognition of foreign divorces and custody decrees to the validity of marriages, the enforcement of money judgments, and the awarding of damages in commercial disputes and negligence matters.
Who needs a constitution or sovereignty when we can just “regularly interpret and apply foreign law”?
As we saw earlier, sharia is Allah’s law—an eternal, unchangeable, and all-encompassing “way,” a moral and legal code that prescribes everything down to the minutiae of daily life. There are varying interpretations, but sharia is something that all Muslims are expected to follow, wherever they live, and it must take precedence over the laws of man.
Abdur Rahman Doi, a Malaysian scholar of Islamic law, explains that the Quran mandates that sharia rule over all Muslims everywhere, for all time:
The entire Muslim Ummah [community] lives under the Shari’ah to which every member has to submit, with sovereignty belonging to Allah alone. . . . Shari’ah was not revealed for limited application for a specific age. It will suit every age and time.
Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, a Pakistani law professor, contends that only sharia can properly govern Muslims:
Any other legal system, howsoever attractive it may appear on the surface, is alien for Muslims and is not likely to succeed in the solution of their problems. . . .
That presumably includes American constitutional law, at least according to the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA), an organization of scholars and clerics that “[issues] fatawa (the plural of “fatwa”—meaning religious formal opinions or rulings) . . . according to the rulings of Shari’ah” for Muslims living in America and the West. At their Fifth Convention, held in Bahrain in November 2007, AMJA decreed:
Allah sent His Messengers and revealed His Books for people to stand forth with justice. The way to do this is to judge by His Laws, to stand up for pure justice and to renounce all the vain desires and human arrangements that go against it. Therefore, it is not lawful to seek judgment from man-made courts of law, unless there is a complete lack of Islamic alternatives. . . .
Muslims are given permission to use secular courts by necessity, but sharia is still established as supreme. In addition, Muslims in the West must find ways to follow sharia however possible:
It is incumbent upon Muslim communities to try to solve their disputes by
compromising within the limits of Shari’ah judgment and by seeking out ways that are legal in their countries of residence which would enable them to judge by Islamic Law. . . .
One of AMJA’s senior Permanent Fatwa Committee members, Dr. Waleed al-Maneese of the Islamic University of Minnesota, counseled that a Muslim who becomes a judge in America should “understand the Shari’a in such a manner as to be able to rule by it in every case brought before him, or at least as close as he’s able to. . . . He also must in his heart hate the man-made law.”
The Quran, Hadith, and a consensus of Islamic scholars suggest that Muslims should respect sharia law over the laws of whatever nation they happen to live in. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. What should shock us, however, is that American courts have helped them accomplish this. The Center for Security Policy has identified at least 146 cases of sharia law coming into conflict with American law. Here are just a few examples:
• SD v. MJR, New Jersey, 2010: A Muslim woman was denied a restraining order against her husband, who had repeatedly raped and beaten her. The husband asserted it was his right under sharia law to have sex with his wife at any time, and the trial court held that since the husband believed he was exercising his “religious right,” he was not acting with criminal intent. Fortunately this decision was reversed on appeal.
• In Re: Marriage of Obaidi, Washington State, 2010: A Muslim woman who was divorcing her husband demanded that he pay her twenty thousand dollars under a prenuptial agreement made in accordance with sharia law. This agreement, however, had been written in Farsi, which the husband did not understand. Despite this fact, the trial court, specifically citing Islamic law, demanded the husband pay the twenty thousand dollars. This was reversed on appeal, and the trial court was found to have “erred by looking to Islamic law.”