US must reject Sharia totalitarianism By Andrew G. Bostom

JNS : 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.

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