The proliferation of semi-autonomous Muslim majority communities in Western Europe applying aspects of “Sharia,” Islamic law jurisdiction, has alerted some U.S. lawmakers to this same developing phenomenon in America.
During a Feb. 10 hearing titled “Sharia-Free America: Why Political Islam and Sharia Law Are Incompatible with the U.S. Constitution,” the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Constitution will examine evidence about the potential threat that Sharia poses to the basic freedoms underpinning our constitutional republic.
Sharia is derived from Islam’s most important foundational texts, the Quran and hadith (the canonical collections of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s deeds and pronouncements), and their interpretation and codification by Islam’s greatest classical legists. Not merely holistic, in the general sense of all-encompassing, it is totalitarian, regulating everything from the ritual aspects of religion to personal hygiene to the governance of a Muslim-minority community or an Islamic state, bloc of states or global Islamic order.
At its core, it demonstrates the yawning gap between Western and Islamic conceptions of freedom, hurriyya in Arabic. Indeed, following Sharia slavishly throughout one’s life was paramount to hurriyya, whose essence was pronounced by the 11th-century Sufi scholar al-Qushayri as “the perfection of slavery to Allah, and [his] religious law.”
Clearly, Sharia-based governance is the most troubling contemporary aspect of this Muslim conception of organizing society, being an ancient antecedent of more familiar modern totalitarian systems.
Specifically, Sharia’s liberty-crushing and dehumanizing political aspects feature open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties, including freedom of conscience and speech, enforced by imprisonment, beating or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs and of even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric, mandatory hadd punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery and lashing for alcohol consumption.
Writing in the early 1950s, Robert H. Jackson, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1941-1954), who also served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, elucidated succinctly how liberty-crushing Sharia was the antithesis of Western law:
“Islamic Law (Sharia) offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts … its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies. ... In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of WesternLaw … Islamic law finds its chief source in the will of Allah as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It contemplates one community of the faithful, though they may be of various tribes and in widely separated locations. Religion, not nationalism or geography, is the proper cohesive force. The state itself is subordinate to the Quran, which leaves little room for additional legislation, none for criticism or dissent. … It is not possible to separate political or juristic theories from the teachings of the Prophet, which establish rules of conduct concerning religious, domestic, social, and political life. This results in a law of duties, rather than rights … .”
Alarmingly, since 1990, the Organization of the Islamic Conference/Cooperation, the largest voting bloc in the United Nations, has been pushing a Sharia-based framework for “human rights”—the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which would abrogate existing instruments much more protective of human freedom and dignity such as the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the best such instrument, the U.S. Bill of Rights.
Hard data from Muslim societies illustrate, plausibly, the unacceptable non-Muslim religious persecution and bigotry that adoption of the Sharia-based legal framework, and accompanying mores of the Cairo Declaration, would engender. Muslim societies that embrace Sharia overall, or regarding the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy law, have the worst global Christian persecution indices and harbor populations with the highest prevalence, by far, of extreme antisemitism.
The latter, disproportionate extreme antisemitism exhibited by Muslims is now manifest in Muslim diaspora populations in both Western Europe and the United States.
Concerning data from a nationally representative sample of n=324 U.S. Muslims surveyed in September 2024, revealed that 50% favored Sharia blasphemy law (i.e., “making it illegal to show a picture or cartoon of Muhammad”), 39% supported broad application of the Sharia, and 33% wanted “Islam declared as our national religion.”
I close with a plaintive 2011 warning from Pakistani bishop Michael Nazir Ali, who immigrated to the United Kingdom and became the first non-white diocesan bishop in the Church of England.
“At its heart, it [Sharia] has basic inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between men and women. The problem with Sharia law being used in tribunals [in Britain] is that it compromises the tradition of equality for all under the law. It threatens the fundamental values that underpin our society.”
