Morning Feature – No, Shariah Law is Not Being Imposed in the US
The media should be doing a better job of debunking baseless GOP fear mongering. (More)
Desperate to turn the political discussion away from economic issues they cannot win on, Republican Presidential candidates have latched onto the claim that Islamic shariah law is somehow overtaking the US. For example, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich has been quoted as saying that “Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States,” and that “the left’s refusal to tell the truth about the Islamist threat is a natural parallel to the 70-year pattern of left-wing intellectuals refusing to tell the truth about communism and the Soviet Union.” Similar statements have been made by other GOP candidates, such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain, and much of the right-wing blogosphere is obsessed with the purported “threat” of shariah law coming to the US. Thirteen states have seen legislation introduced to ban Shariah law, and Gingrich has gone so far as to propose a federal law banning shariah law here in the US.
Conservative fear-mongering about Shariah law is absolutely ridiculous claptrap. For one thing, there are numerous variants of shariah law, from the most brutal and orthodox versions practices in Saudi Arabia and by the Taliban, to far more liberal and modern versions practiced in other Muslim countries. Regardless, the only purported examples of shariah law in the US that conservatives can point to is a single wrongly-decided trial court decision in a domestic violence dispute in New Jersey that was quickly overturned on appeal, and the City of Dearborn, Michigan, which is approximately 32% Arab American (most of whom are actually Lebanese Christians). As Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly likes to point out, Dearborn is not run by shariah law, a fact that is demonstrated by the presence of three strip clubs and a pork sausage factory within its borders. No major organizations in the US are pushing for the establishment of shariah, and even if such effort existed, it would have to run through the impossibly difficult gauntlet of religious liberty protected by the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution and a Congress that has only a single Muslim member. In short, shariah law is not coming to America.
Normally, Winning Progressive would ignore such conservative distractions, as discussing them plays into the conservative attempt to divert our politics away from the serious issues facing our nation. But in this case there are at least two reasons to address the GOP’s fear mongering. First, you can draw a direct line from this fear mongering to a disturbing anti-Muslim bias in our society. Incidents such as Lowe’s home improvement stores and other companies refusing to advertise on the television show All-American Muslim and the protests that erupt against proposals to build mosques suggest a growing, un-American objection to Muslim Americans being viewed as equal members of society here in the US. And the flames of such exclusion are being irresponsibly fanned by GOP Presidential candidates making false claims about shariah law.
Second, this issue presents yet another example of our media’s failure to play its role in providing the information that people need to be well-informed. A good journalist would either dismiss the GOP’s claims about shariah law out of hand or would provide the information the readers need to realize that the GOP’s claims are baseless claptrap. Instead, we get he-said, she-said stenography in articles such as the New York Times’ one titled In Shariah, Gingrich Seems Mortal Threat to U.S. in which the reporter dutifully quotes the right-wing’s shariah claims interspersed with references to various scholars and officials rejecting those claims:
Mr. Gingrich was articulating a much-disputed thesis in vogue with some conservative thinkers but roundly rejected by many American Muslims, scholars of Islam and counterterrorism officials.
[...]
The idea that Shariah poses a danger in the United States, where the census pegs Muslims as less than 1 percent of the population, strikes many scholars as quixotic.Even within that 1 percent, most American Muslims have no enthusiasm for replacing federal and state law with Shariah, as some conservatives fear, let alone adopting such ancient prescriptions as stoning for adulterers, said Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, who spent a year traveling the United States and interviewing Muslims for his 2010 book “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.”
The notion of a threat from Shariah to the United States “takes your breath away, it’s so absurd,” Dr. Ahmed said. He sees political demagoguery in the anti-Shariah campaign, which fueled rallies against mosques in the last two years from Manhattan to Tennessee.
Who is right about this? Unfortunately, the article provides no basis for the reader to know. Instead, after dutifully explaining that conservatives see shariah as a major threat, while other people think it is not, the reporter then turns to a Muslim-American who was included in an anti-Islam film made by Gingrich:
One Muslim activist who is shown in the film calling for “separation of mosque and state,” Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, said he appreciated Mr. Gingrich’s support in an ideological contest with large Muslim advocacy groups in the United States that he believes have an Islamist slant.
The article then closes with a quote from Mohamed Elibiary, a former Newt Gingrich supporter, noting that the anti-shariah campaign is “propaganda for jihadists” because it serves to demonize Muslim Americans rather than recognize them as fellow Americans. What the article does not contain is any of the readily available facts that demonstrate that the GOP’s claims about shariah are baseless fear mongering. Instead, the reader is left having to decide for themselves whether they agree with the GOP candidates and Mr. Jasser, or whether they think that the handful of voices on the other side of the issue are correct.
The problem with this kind of reporting is that it enables the GOP to create these sorts of fake controversies with impunity. And, unfortunately, in this situation, such reporting allows the GOP to fan the flames of anti-Muslim bias and create exactly the kind of “propaganda for jihadists” that Mr. Elibiary described. Journalists should do better than that, and if we want a well-functioning democracy moving forward, we must demand that they do.
If you would like to respectfully let the reporter know your concerns about this type of he-said, she-said stenography, you can e-mail them here.
Just before Christmas I had lunch with a Muslim friend and asked how she and her family were handling all this ugly rhetoric. Her eyes grew sad and she said quietly, “We try not to pay attention to it.”
I have known this woman for six years. She is a mother with children in public schools, she works hard at her job to help support her family, and is a good and true friend. I have seen her offer kindnesses that many others would simply not think to offer. And her desire to see Sharia become part of American life is about as strong as my desire to see the Pope run this country, which is to say not at all.
The main religious influence in American public life is coming from the Christian Right, and pardon me, I find that more threatening. A single letter from them causes advertisers to drop a show. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting Lowe’s decision to withdraw advertising has had no impact at all, except to get Lowe’s to pull its explanation from Facebook after negative comments about the decision became a minor mountain.
I can only remember what Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Fear turns us into less-than-human. It makes us do ugly things without reason.
Just last week, the Department of Defense announced they would develop policies to allow Muslim and Sikh students to wear head scarves or turbans in high school JROTC programs. The announcement was in response to a letter of complaint on behalf of an Orlando-area student.
Of course, this met with predictable howls of outrage from conservatives: cries that the Army was imposing sharia, demands that Congress declare Islam to be not a religion, that Muslims in the military would turn on “real Americans,” and so on.
The Islamophobic fear mongering is partly political, and partly the expression of a cultivated and nurtured Christian persecution complex, where people see themselves as ‘oppressed’ any time they are not allowed to impose their views on everyone else:
The “creeping sharia” narrative substitutes Islam for humanism, but at the core it’s the same argument: Christians must be alowed to “dominate our society” … and anything less is ‘oppression.’
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
I’ve heard this argument before, and frankly it sickens me. As a child, before I even understood the First Amendment, I knew something was terribly wrong at our school assemblies every morning. I was a Catholic. The boy sitting next to me was Jewish. And every single morning we received a reading from the King James Bible (not his version or mine) and prayed the Lord’s Prayer (not my version, and certainly not his prayer at all).
I used to sit there and squirm and wonder what I was supposed to do about a version of prayer I wasn’t supposed to pray, a reading from a Bible that was not my version. And I squirmed even more when I thought about my friend, for whom none of this was his religion. I was 8 and I could figure out that this was not right.
Does anyone know what Sharia Law says about Newton’s er, “activities?”
This is crazy stuff. Next, they’ll be saying that President Obama is a muslim socialist. Wait a minute.
It really is perplexing that people take this nonsense seriously.
I was reading an article a few weeks ago about NY’s Catholic Governor, Al Smith and his presidential run. Around the same time, the Lincoln Tunnel (connecting NYC and NJ) was being built. Rumors had it that the bridge would open to coincide with Al Smith’s election to facilitate the Pope’s travel plans to Washington, D.C., where he would become the de facto leader.
I hadn’t heard that one before, Mike. Wow. Some of our brains really take interesting hikes, don’t they?
Here’s a great article about the 5 ridiculous things you probably believe about Islam. Some neat information in there that would probably cause heart attacks in the “conservative” groups.
Great article, Norbrook. I really enjoyed it. Thanks!
I have a friend, a psychiatrist, who took a job in Saudi Arabia after his home was firebombed and shot at. He had to think of his wife and kids.
The result? Our town has been deprived of one of the best psychiatrists in the area, many mentally ill can no longer get medications filled as quickly or easily, and and there is just a little less diversity in this red state.
He loved it here. Loved the mountains, loved the people and liked the culture. I am sure the Saudi government is probably paying him more in a month than he was making in a year here, plus he will not have to pay income taxes. But we are poorer in more than just tax dollars now.
Thanks to the mouth breathers that targeted him, his wife and two little kids because they are Muslim, we have one less doctor we could not afford to lose.
This is a sad, sad story, Otteray Scribe. I hate that people in this country are behaving this way and talking this way. I apologized to my friend, but I doubt that helped at all.
It’s great to see you again.