American Mullah

The American right wing (or far right; how could you tell anymore?) has tried to substitute “sharia” for the Communist Manifesto, attempting to configure it as radical or inherently un-American.

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Newt Gingrich suggested late last week on cable tv that Muslim Americans should be asked if they believe in “sharia” and if they answer yes, they should be deported. You can’t deport US citizens, so the whole remark was ridiculous.

Sharia for Muslims is the equivalent of Canon Law for Catholics, Halakhah for Jews, and I guess the entire Bible for some fundamentalists (though there are laws in Deuteronomy that it is hard to imagine anyone actually practicing). All religions have laws. Sharia is the Muslim one. But it is fluid and an arena of contention within Islam. It forbids murder, theft, adultery, and drinking. You’d think people would be happy about all that. In any case, observant Muslims would all say they believe in sharia, just as observant Jews would say that the believe in Halakhah or observant Catholics would say they believe in canon law.

Although most interpretations of sharia frown on same-sex marriage, American Muslims are more likely to support it than are US evangelicals.

  Juan Cole

That would just be another reason Trump supporters would want them deported.

It is only for fringe extremists that vigilanteism is allowed, and that is true in all religions.

One of the alleged grounds on which people like Gingrich attack Muslim religious law is that they say they fear the 1% of Americans who are Muslims will try to impose it on everyone else. That allegation is also ridiculous.

If you're old enough, you will remember that the same rationale was trotted out for keeping John Kennedy from gaining the White House: He's Catholic. He could enact a law that we all have to become Catholic.

But there is a religious law that poses such a danger to secular and liberal traditions in the United States and that is the evangelical sharia, to which Trump running mate Mike Pence is devoted.

Pence is welcome to his own private beliefs. But he wants to impose Evangelical beliefs on all Americans.

1. Pence wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion made illegal. He holds this position because of an unprovable, unscientific belief that the human person begins at conception (not something held by traditional Christianity). Pence wants to take control of 150 million women’s bodies in the United States and to inscribe his Christian sharia on them. And he wants to do this in the teeth of settled secular law. [...] He actually signed a law requiring burial or cremation for aborted fetuses.

2. Pence’s personal and narrow theology has to be imposed on the rest of us even at the level of foreign policy. He said at an AIPAC conference, ““Let me say emphatically, like the overwhelming majority of my constituents, my Christian faith compels me to cherish the state of Israel.” If he had said that his Christian faith requires him to cherish the state of Argentina or Thailand or North Korea, we’d want to know why his weird doctrines should shape US foreign policy.

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3. Pence pushed for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. There are no secular grounds for opposing this simple human right.

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Pence and other people of faith are welcome to believe and practice as they will in the United States– that’s one of the purposes of the United States. I personally admire people of strong faith and conviction. But they are not welcome to Establish an official religion here and impose that religion’s laws on everybody; preventing that kind of thing is also one of the purposes of the United States.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.