Talking points for the modern Muslim
Lance on Feb 10 2008 at 7:59 am | Filed under: Lance's Page, Law, Religion and theology
Ali Eteraz gives his fellow Muslims the rationale for opposing Sharia courts being imported into the west:
14 - Liberal democracy, as is, is perfectly compatible with Islam
You aren’t making your country more Islamic or even earning more reward by going to Sharia arbitration courts. The Mufti of Egypt thinks liberal democracy is compatible with Islam. A traditionalist jurist, quoting a lot Ghazali, thinks that there is no incompatibility between being an orthodox Muslim and living in a liberal democracy.
Conclusion
There is absolutely no reason for a Muslim to support Sharia arbitration. If you’d like to live in a state where you can resolve your marital, custodial, and divorce disputes under the aegis of classical Islamic law, might I recommend the Gulf? It looks like America and tastes like the 7th century, perfect for a retrogressive Muslim. Cheaper gas for your very Islamic gas guzzler, too.
Not only are the arguments interesting in and of themselves, they give an insight into the reasoning of those who feel otherwise. Read the whole thing.
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Bingo. Why do you think there is no widespread, or even noticeable, movement to impose shari’a in the U.S., the way there is in Europe?
I would suggest that it is because Europe has abandoned significant swaths of traditional liberal Western thought, while we have not. That is obviously a much larger topic, but a cursory glance even at Muslim societies bears out the general trend: shari’a only thrives under and after oppression. Whenever extremism has been put to the vote—from Turkey to Pakistan—the extremists lose big time. But when one form of extremism replaces another—like Khomeini after the Shah—it becomes damned near impossible to dislodge from the outside, and to do so bloodlessly.
This is why we have been so monumentally stupid in supporting Musharraf’s suppression of democracy: the longer he does that, and the more he turns Pakistan into a police state hellbent on destroying Indian Kashmir, the greater the danger that Pakistan will fall to the extremists.
It is a much larger topic, and I am no fan of Musharraf, though I am not sure it is as monumentally stupid as you do for us to support him. If I thought not supporting him would lead to elections that would be respected by other extremists then yeah, pretty much a no brainer. However, I don’t know that democracy would win out and just leave us with another bad guy. Still, I am willing to give it a try. What do we do when the next coup, uprising by fundamentalists or other attempt to overturn the election results comes? I am not sure myself.
Of course, that is also why I think allowing democracy to continue in Iraq is likely to eventually work if we stay.
Democracy is important, but constitutions are what count. Mush should be supported until it is possible to get constitutional reform in Pakistan that allows for genuine democratic governance, but locks out terrorist parties by design.
See Hamas in Palestine, for what happens when you just argue for democracy for its own sake (as Bush did). Supporting Mush is one-half of being “monumentally stupid.” You also have to acknowledge that supporting democracy of any kind for its own sake, in a constitutional framework that legitimizes and empowers extremist political parties, can be even worse.