Shariah in the West

Mogahed also commented benevolently regarding unidentified people, including non-Muslims, who believe "that the United States, and Britain, and other countries should be open to the concept of integrating Shariah into law in Muslim-majority societies." She added, "of course, most Muslim-majority societies do have Shariah as a part of their laws already." In reality, most Muslim-majority societies do not currently treat Shariah as a part of common public law, but as a separate corpus applicable only to exclusively religious matters. Shariah-dominated countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan represent exceptions, not the rule.

Most Muslims in the West accept a standard interpretation of Shariah, which has held throughout Islamic history that Muslim migrants to non-Muslim countries must accept the laws and customs of the lands to which they move. Traditional Muslim scholars emphasize that the Prophet Muhammad called on Muslims who leave Islamic territory "to listen to and obey the ruler, as long as one is not ordered to carry out a sin." No non-Muslim government requires Muslims to violate the rules of their religion by, for example, drinking alcohol, and most afford them liberties that are absent in Muslim countries.

Further, most Muslims living in the West, as in the French example, accept that Islamic law cannot be exported to countries without a Muslim majority. This is also a rule firmly based in Shariah. Most Muslims living in the West only see certain strictly personal matters, previously mentioned here, as subject to Shariah: diet, the form of prayer, payment of obligatory charity, male circumcision, and burial. These matters do not require the involvement of public institutions, except for coroners' offices at death. This traditional and moderate definition of Shariah -- as a set of religious observances rather than public or criminal law -- has been established in the Muslim world for centuries. But most American Muslims know little about Shariah. For example, the Minneapolis Somali cabdrivers were seemingly unaware that Islam does not bar non-Muslims from consuming alcohol, or Muslims from transporting such people, and that only certain rigid interpretations express disfavor of dogs as unclean.

In short, the call for introduction of Shariah in non-Muslim countries is a new and radical concept, without support in Islamic legal traditions. Realizing that any discussion of a Shariah regime in Western countries is not only deeply disturbing to Western non- Muslims but is also rejected by the great majority of Western Muslims, a small group of powerful fundamentalists, associated with the Egyptian theologian Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and the Swiss Muslim author Tariq Ramadan, have developed a new concept, "Shariah for Muslim minorities living in the West," or "parallel Shariah." Their intention is to erect a separate legal system in the Western countries that would have jurisdiction over Muslims, backed by the authority of the non-Muslim state. This group of "parallel Shariah" promoters admits that their aim is not, as it might seem, the protection of Muslims from discrimination, but rather the religious transformation of Western society through an Islamist version of the "long march through the institutions" adopted by the leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s.

But they, too, have little support among ordinary Western Muslims, and the concept has only caught on among Islamic fundamentalists. In the United States, Saudi-oriented Wahhabi clerics and their academic sympathizers generally observe a silence on the topic, and elsewhere, established Muslim leaders -- in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and France -- support loyalty to local institutions as practiced by most of their congregants. Yet "parallel Shariah" appeals to Western sensibilities regarding unfair treatment of Muslims, while exploiting the general ignorance of Shariah among Western Muslims themselves.

Some supporters of Shariah in Canada and the United Kingdom have called for introduction of "Islamic mediation services" in which Shariah decisions would be rendered through conciliation by clerics, with enforcement by the non-Muslim authorities. But even if such a legal paradigm were based on exclusively voluntary participation, the probability remains that such proceedings, in the U.K. and Canadian Muslim communities today, would be governed by fundamentalists.

What, then, is the threat of Shariah to Western liberty, and what should be done about it? The problem is not one of a sudden radical Muslim takeover of the West. Rather, it resides with a small, unpopular, but powerful Saudi-financed layer of top Muslim leaders who seek to undermine Western canons of legal equality by introducing "parallel Shariah." While it may seem innocuous to some, such a conception is pernicious in seeking to unduly increase the influence in Western institutions of a single religion, Islam, while driving Western Muslims apart from their non-Muslim neighbors. This is a radical and seditious notion even if it does not call for a violent assault on Western society.