I bet you did not know that the US Constitution is “sharia compliant.” No, seriously it is. Ok, I am not an expert on the US constitution, and quite frankly I don’t know the first thing about sharia except that I believe that it is about Islamic law and that all Islamic countries have to conform to sharia. So that’s why it came as a bit of shock to learn that the US constitution was sharia compliant. Here’s how.
Out of the goodness of his heart my friend in Mt View, CA sends me links for my edification. Today I received an education that I would like to share with you, out of the goodness of my heart. It’s a 2-part article by Ibn Warraq in the National Review Online. When you have some time, click on the previous link on the wiki article on Warraq. But for now, keep your attention on Warraq’s article.
It’s in part 2 of Warraq’s article — The Two Faces of Feisal Rauf — that I am astonished to learn that the US constitution is sharia compliant. The imam in question is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, now famous for being the champion of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” formerly known as the “Cordoba House,” and now generally referred to as “Park51.”
Many devout Muslims are aware of the abysmal lack of scientific achievements of the Islamic world in the last thousand years — but they commonly have recourse to the ingenious notion that the Koran anticipated all the Western scientific discoveries of the last thousand years; thus one can find electricity, quantum mechanics, relativity, and embryology in it. Rauf does something similar with the Islamic world’s lack of American values, claiming that “America is substantively an ‘Islamic’ country, by which I mean a country whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of a government.”
Wow! So I guess sharia is all about freedom of expression, the rights of individuals, the equality of sexes, the separation of church and state, and representative democracy. I guessed that maybe the framers of the US constitution were a lazy bunch and looked around for something to use as the basic template. Noting that the Islamic countries are the most successful, they must have figured that the answer lay in sharia. So they checked it out and found that it was perfect. Being practical men, and lazy on top of that, they figured that a cut-and-paste job was all that they needed to do. Change a word here, alter a line there, and voila — The Constitution of the United States of America. Basically the US Constitution (c. 1780CE) is Sharia 2.0 (c. 700CE). Who could blame them. Sharia 1.0 was in the public domain, considering that 1,000 years had passed since it’s publication. The US constitution is a derivative work created under the creative commons license, I figured.
On the next page of that article, I realized that I guessed wrong. Here’s how Warraq explains it:
Rauf’s claim is complete nonsense. Sharia is totally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Women are inferior under Islamic law — their testimony in a court of law is worth half that of a man; their movement is strictly restricted; they cannot marry non-Muslims. Non-Muslims living in Muslim countries also have inferior status under Islamic law; they may not testify against a Muslim. In Saudi Arabia, following a tradition of Muhammad, who said that “two religions cannot exist in the country of Arabia,” non-Muslims are forbidden to practice their religion, build houses of worship, possess religious texts, etc. Non-believers or atheists in Muslim countries do not have “the right to life”; all the major law schools, whether Sunni or Shia, agree that they are to be killed. (Muslim doctors of law generally divide sins into great sins and little sins. Of the 17 great sins, unbelief is the greatest, more heinous than murder, theft, adultery, etc.) Slavery is recognized as legitimate in the Koran. Muslim men are allowed to cohabit with any of their female slaves, and they are allowed to take possession even of married female slaves. One does not have the right to change one’s religion if one is born into a Muslim family; here is how the great commentator Baydawi sees the matter: “Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever you find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard.” And here are the punishments in store for transgressors against the Holy Law: amputation, flogging, crucifixion, and stoning to death.
Here I will pause to note that non-Muslims are generally ignorant of what Islam is. Some have an idiotic fanciful notion that all religions are about love and goodwill, and live and let live, and every now and then will give a plaintive cry, “Oh why can’t we all just get along!” Never having bothered to read the Koran (Qur’an), they cannot imagine that a religious ideology can be viciously and murderously hateful of all non-Muslims. Jews and Christians, as “people of the book,” at least are allowed to live as “dhimmis” under their Muslim overlords. But Islam mandates its followers to outright kill people like me — an idolater.
Well, you’d say, it’s just the ideology. No true Muslim actually goes about killing idolaters. Tell that to the Kashimiri pundits languishing in the refugee camps in India for decades. Tell that to the Hindus of Deganga in West Bengal who have been the victims of on-going Muslim rioting. Refer to the injunction in the Koran (sura 9, ayah 5) “when the holy months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you may find them. Arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” The holy month of ramadan got over.
Just by the way, when I read that I thought, “Shouldn’t the order be first ambush, then besiege, then arrest, and finally slay?” Anyway, god moves in mysterious ways, as the monotheists say, and who am I to question his word since I am a disbelieving atheist idolatrous kaffir?
Getting back to the matter at hand, here’s more from Warraq about some books by imam Rauf:
While, in his later work, Rauf gushes about “our common Abrahamic faith,” and about the U.S. Constitution’s being “Sharia compliant,” in the earlier work, he states (rather than argues) that Islam and sharia are far superior to Judaism and Christianity, and also to any man-made laws such as those in the U.S. Constitution. He accuses both Judaism and Christianity of having “eviscerated the spiritual dimension from Sacred Law.” Islam is, says Rauf, repeating Sura 3 verse 110, “the best religion on earth.”