The Truth Will Set You Free: How to Bury the Threat from Shariah by Pretending It Doesn’t Exist

By David Yerushalmi at BigPeace

Maajid Nawaz’s oped in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal attempts to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism. While there may indeed be such an argument if “Islam” means any given Muslim’s personal, subjective approach to the divine and “Islamism” means Sharia-adherence and –advocacy, this is not the argument Nawaz presents. In fact, Nawaz never really tells us what he means except to slide into an argument that Islamic “traditionalists,” impliedly devout and even Shariah-adherent, reject the political and hegemonic aims of the “Islamists.”…

Indeed, even Nawaz concedes that there were times when Shariah was state law. The question of course is how could that be if Shariah demanded as a theoretical matter to be separated from the political sphere. Does the Islamic traditionalist’s Shariah adopt the extant Christian doctrine of “render unto Caesar” or does it not? Anyone who would argue publicly that doctrinaire “traditionalist” Shariah demands anything other than political power in a hegemonic Caliphate either knows literally nothing of Shariah or is engaged in deception and propaganda. All one needs to do is open up the most authoritative text on Islamic law available in English today, Reliance of the Traveler. It has the imprimatur of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, the Harvard of Shariah. Turn to the ‘Book of Justice’—where else? Once there, turn to the sections on Jihad. There you will learn the when, where and how of the law. It isn’t what Nawaz says it is by a quite lengthy stretch……

If Nawaz wants to make an argument that there is an “Islam” residing in the hearts of hundreds of millions of individual pietistic Muslims embracing a kind of Islamic version of Protestantism, fine. But the “traditionalists” within the Islamic religion go back to Mohammed and the Four Righteous Caliphs and the Shariah law which developed out of a very political, very militaristic tradition. That political, imperialistic tradition was codified within the ijma (consensus) of all of the legal schools we know as Shariah. “Traditionalist” Muslims know this quite well, which suggests a rather dubious motive behind Nawaz’s subterfuge.

Read it all…

[ It’s really pretty simple. Be very wary of Muslims who try to obfuscate or deny their wish for society (meaning us) to eventually be ruled by Shariah law. – JS ]

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