By Stephen Schwartz

On October 28, 2009, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, an African American Muslim, was killed in a shootout with agents of the FBI in Detroit. The dead man was one of twelve individuals sought for firearms violations and conspiracy to engage in theft and fraud. But they were also members of a little-known Islamist network dedicated to the establishment, through violence if necessary, of an enclave on U.S. territory to be governed by Islamic religious law, or Shariah. Their designated candidate to rule this separatist territory was the prominent black nationalist known in the 1960s as H. Rap Brown, and now as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who at the time of the Detroit incident was serving a life term without parole at the U.S. federal prison in Florence, Colorado, for murdering a police officer in Georgia (along with other charges).

The conspiracy to establish Shariah in a secessionist enclave within America never, it seems, became a practical attempt. But fantasies of introducing Shariah in the United States have gained increasing attention as American society has come under assault, both globally and domestically, from radical Muslims. The most widely acknowledged case of Shariah imposition so far known originated at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and was revealed to the wider public in 2006. There, immigrant Somali Muslim cabdrivers would not take airport arrival passengers carrying alcohol or accompanied by dogs (including guide dogs for blind customers), on the grounds that for them to do so would violate Shariah. The Muslim drivers had begun their boycott on liquor and dogs about ten years previously, and airport customers had complained about the situation. In one incident sixteen drivers successively declined to carry "objectionable" passengers. The Somali cabdrivers applied to the Metropolitan Airports Commission for authorization to refuse service on religious grounds without being sent to the back of the airport taxi line and losing opportunities to make money.

The Metropolitan Airports Commission rejected the petition, but proposed a supposedly moderate compromise: drivers who would not carry alcohol or dogs could have a special light installed on their cabs indicating their enforcement of a ban. The commission produced this "solution" after consultation with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a radical Islamist group that favors introduction of Shariah into the United States. But while the commission imagined it was deliberating and acting fairly, the proposal for special taxis for Muslim drivers had potentially disastrous consequences. A public agency would have, for the first time, established a Shariah law interpretation on public property in the United States.

After deliberating, however, the commission found against the Somali cabbies and denied their request. The old rules continued in place: drivers who refused customers went to the back of the line. But nothing had been done to actively restrain the drivers from their discriminatory actions.

Americans have also recently learned of so-called honor murders committed by Muslims in the United States, and generally believe such crimes, usually carried out against family members, are a Shariah-based practice.