In thousands of Islamist madrasas worldwide, Muslim youth are being told that their fundamental choice is between going to hell or struggling (“jihad”) to cover the world with sharia governments.
No matter our respect for Islam as contributive to world civilization, and our recognition that the ummah (Muslim community) in the form of a political state is entitled to have its own laws (in the case of Muslim states, sharia), in Islamists’ hearts and hands sharia is not only the legal structure of Muslim states but also a programmatic sword for penetrating and conquering “dar es harb” (war territory, meaning all the world not presently under sharia).
Now to the question: “The Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested that English law must accommodate some aspects of sharia – the body of Islamic religious law. Do you agree? Should U.S. law make room for sharia?”
The Archbishop of Canterbury is an eminent Christian theologian of generous spirit. But I worry that like all good things, generosity can get out of hand. If English law opens up to admit the sword-point of a radically different legal mentality, law itself will be reduced in its dignity and law enforcement will become more difficult.
American exceptionalism includes the fact that almost all who get to live here consider themselves Americans. Not so in Britain, which consists of ethnic-religious enclaves. Few British Muslims consider themselves British, so why should they not want to be governed by their own rather than by English law?
No, U.S. law should not make room for sharia. At the end of the 19th century, our national government refused to accommodate Mormon polygamy – and the president of that church said he obtained a divine “revelation” against polygamy even though Joseph Smith, the first Mormon prophet, said he had received a “revelation” in favor of it. Washington did not let generosity get out of hand.
Because America is so open and free, some slip into the romantic notion that we are the world-in-small and can be – without destruction of the American way of life – a pluralistic world-state, with all traditions equal. But the fact is that America is culture-specific. It began with English immigrants, and Americans are English-speaking (whatever other languages they may wish to continue). English law was fundamental; and, admixed with a few other elements, it took the form of the U.S. Constitution. English religion was various versions of Christianity.
A short way to signal all this is in the phrase "the American mind.” The American mind has always been both “under God” (the God of the Bible + the Enlightenment) and early came to be “under the Constitution.” Opening to any alien system of religious-legal thinking – even to the smallest degree – would present the American mind with a rival on its own turf, and initiate a growing controversy and chaos, the playing out of “the crisis of civilization” (the West and Islam in conflict) right here at home.
The root of the threat of such a calamity is in that word “equal,” a holy word in our civil religion. If equality is the summum bonum, the highest political value, efforts to deny it to anyone or to any point of view strikes many as blasphemous. Setting aside the question whether the world’s religions and legal structures are equal in value, the American mind (and way of life) is a particular mind which would destroy itself if it welcomed rivals on equal terms.
Lincoln saw to it that America did not break up into states. We now need to see to it that the American culture and civilization (the American mind) does not break down into rivaling minds contending for victory over our unique marriage of plurality and unity (“e pluribus unum”).
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