Sharia in the West – Is This a Reality? – Raheel Raza

Raheel Raza is an award winning writer, professional speaker, diversity consultant, documentary filmmaker, playwright and author of Their jihad… not my jihad; A Muslim Woman Speaks Out. Born in Pakistan, Raheel Raza now lives in Toronto, Canada, where she is a board member of the Muslim Canadian Congress and a freelance journalist. On a visit to Australia, Raheel Raza addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 5 October 2011.

SHARIA IN THE WEST – IS THIS A REALITY?

RAHEEL RAZA

I am delighted and honoured to be here. I am a Pakistani by birth, a Canadian by choice and Islam is my spiritual journey. I use the term “spiritual” intentionally, because it’s important to clarify, right at the top, that faith is not politics and politics is not faith. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between political Islam which we call Islamism and the spiritual message.

This spiritual message of Islam, the faith, has within it the potential to be part of a world civilisation, and is no different from any other monotheistic faith. Fortunately for us, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are not pursuing political Islam. If you were to ask me whether I implement sharia in my life, my answer would be yes.

Before you get your backs up, let me give you a quick one-on-one on sharia. Sharia is a word that means flowing path to water – i.e. it reflects fluidity and is supposed to be totally flexible and applicable to this day and age, dealing with current issues. The word “sharia” is mentioned only three times in the Qur’an, where it means moral and ethical guidance. Observant Muslims implement the moral and ethical guidelines of sharia in their life governing strictly religious matters such as diet, fasting, charity, prayer, pre-nuptial agreements, birth and so on, without any side-effects because a) they are not forcing it in the public sphere and b) they are not using it as a parallel legal system in a non-Muslim environment. Let me clarify that sharia itself states that it cannot be introduced into a non-Muslim country.

The Prophet after being persecuted in Makkah in the initial stages of imparting the message of Islam, enjoined the muhajirs immigrants who went to Christian-ruled Ethiopia to obey the law and customs of the country to which they emigrated. This cannot be and has never been challenged in Islam except very recently by marginal figures. A small group of Wahhabi figures including Al-Qaradawi and Tariq Ramadan, a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, have discussed and published in favor of the introduction of fiqh or an Islamic legal system for Muslim minorities living in Western countries.

That “Shari’ah” has played a pivotal role in Islamic history as a means of bringing diverse groups of Muslims within a single legal religious framework, is beyond dispute.  However I don’t for a moment believe that spread of shariah is an intrinsic element of Islam in the life of every Muslim. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan are the only countries with a pretence to a completely shariah-based legal system, and it has failed in Sudan.  Elsewhere, it is limited to certain regions, as in Nigeria.

However, the claim made by some Muslims that the “Shari’ah” is “divine” cannot be validated logically or theologically. “Shari’ah” is derived from four sources, namely, the Qur’an (the scripture of the Muslims), Hadith & Sunnah (sayings and practices of the Prophet, not all of which are validated) Ijma’ (consensus of the community) and Qiyas (analogical reasoning) or Ijtihad (independent judgment).  Of these sources, only one – the Qur’an – is believed by Muslims to be divine, and there is a clear direction for Muslims that any law which contradicts the Qur’an and human rights must be questioned.

Shari’a was implemented as an Islamic system of law about 100 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammad – even 1400 years ago there were aspects of sharia that were women friendly, compassionate, tolerant and ethical and dealt with that time and place.

Over time, sharia was frozen with no development, reasoning and logic and therefore started to stink which is what happens when water is left stagnant. Eventually it became what we see today – man made law without ethical and moral boundaries, no regard for human life and specifically anti-women.

This is what I will discuss with you keeping in mind that I am speaking of the politicization of a message that came to bring reason back to the unreasonable, rights to the downtrodden and bring women out of darkness.

In recent times, the sources used for sharia are a usually references from Umdat us Salike – Reliance of the Traveller – a classical manual of Islamic law, endorsed by Al-Azhar in 1991, conforming ‘to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community. There is severe material, largely consisting of relatively recent texts written by ideologues, such as Abul Ala Mawdudi from Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb from Egypt whose teachings promote violence leading to terrorism. These, as well as materials published and disseminated by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, are primarily, if not exclusively, aimed at using Islam to advance a violent political agenda and treat women as second class citizens.

Where has this politicisation and distortion of the message left us?

A Muslim group in the United Kingdom has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence. The Islamic Emirates Project, launched by the Muslims Against the Crusades group, uses the motto “The end of man-made law, and the start of Sharia law,” and was launched exactly six years after Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 800 others in London. A 7 July 2011 announcement posted on the Muslims Against the Crusades website, states:

In the last 50 years, the United Kingdom has transformed beyond recognition. What was once a predominantly Christian country has now been overwhelmed by a rising Muslim population, which seeks to preserve its Islamic identity, and protect itself from the satanic values of the tyrannical British government.

By the way,  this same “satanic, tyrannical” British government has allowed about 80 sharia courts to operate in UK so please don’t miss the irony of using Western freedoms to perpetuate religious ideologies.

British Islamists also have outreach into USA – A well known Islamist, Anjem Choudary  who once said ‘the flag of Islam will fly over the White House’ – has announced he will lead a demonstration calling on Muslims to establish Sharia law across America. Some states in USA are considering sharia law as a parallel system despite immense protests.

In Canada, a few years ago, a group of Muslims tried to implement sharia law in the Province of Ontario, a move that was thwarted and the law allowing religious arbitration was trashed. However, even today the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) declares on its website that it aims at applying Islam “as understood in its contemporary context by the late Imam, Hassan Al Banna”. Hasan al Banna for those of you who don’t know was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a well documented 50-point manifesto of the Muslim Brotherhood promotes an application of sharia that leads to a one-party state, the prohibition of dancing & music, the censorship of books and movies, the implementation of specific curricula for boys and girls and even a dress code for all citizens enforced by a religious police as in Iran and Saudi Arabia. I must say they believe in having fun!

Right here in Australia, I read the news that a 20-year-old Muslim man was accused of whipping a Sydney man 40 times as part of an alleged sharia law punishment for drinking alcohol and shockingly the accused has been granted bail. I am also aware of the presence of an extremist organisation known as Hizb ut Tahrir, who wish to establish a Caliphate in the West. When I wrote a scathing article about their annual conference in Australia, they wrote back to me in anger and scorn threatening me and implying that as a Muslim I should shut up because this applies only to Muslims?”

Well hello – We are Muslims who don’t want sharia or a Caliphate in the West and have come here to get away from dogma, theocracy and forced religiosity.

This my friends is the reality on the ground so have no doubts in your mind, that there is a subversive Wahabbi/Salafi agenda. Named after the reformer, Abd al-Wahhab, who died in 1791, this puritanical movement acquired an explosive energy after its founder allied himself with a petty Arab chieftain, Muhammad Ibn Saud. To propagate their particular brand of Islam, the Wahhabis attacked fellow Muslims whose practices they considered “un-Islamic” only because they differed in interpretation.

Wahhabis steadily expanded their power over Central and Western Arabia until they were able to effect the political unification of the peninsula into the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Once established, the Wahhabi authorities instituted a religious police force, which, among its other functions, compels Muslims to perform ritual prayer at the appropriate times of the day in direct contradiction to the Quran’s commandment, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.”

Not surprisingly, this movement considered Jews and Christians to be infidels, and their motto is that since you’re going to burn in hell anyway, we will help get you there faster. To this day, Saudi Arabia’s state version of Islam is founded on an exclusivist, misogynist interpretation of the Qur’an, intolerant of both interreligious and intrareligious plurality. Through the use of millions of petrodollars, the Saudis’ extreme interpretation of Islam has been exported all over the Muslim world, much to the dismay of the liberals and pluralists.

These are the people who wish to impose sharia in the West and are gaining ground only because there is a failed attempt to understand their psyche and there is deafening silence from the majority of moderate Muslims who are sitting quietly on the fence.

This is why the Islamists are still here. Otherwise they would have left when politely asked by your PM, and many of us who are willing to find them a one-way ticket. We are very proud of Stephen Harper, our PM in Canada who has also identified the Islamist threat as real. It’s about time, that the leader of the free world, Barack Obama also spoke of this threat.

Please indulge me for a moment as it’s important to clarify a few terms right off the top.

I share this with you because it’s important in the battle against Islamism, that we as traditional moderate Muslims who have to fight fire with fire, arm ourselves with the knowledge about where the problems are emanating from, confront them and deal with them through the same ideological basis that is used to propagate them – Islam. I say this with feeling because the reform has to come from within the Muslim world.

However, in this movement, we need the help of ordinary citizens and Western governments because this is not a ghettoised Muslim problem – terror and radicalisation affect you and me together. The Islamists who are better organised, better funded and much more in numbers than we are, have some strange bed fellows.

For example, a coalition of organisations that includes the American Jewish Committee (AJC) is supporting use of Sharia law in the United State’s courts. They believe that banning Sharia law is “an attack on religious freedom”.

Who are they kidding? Can an interpretation of a faith that legitimises violence in the name of divinity qualify for religious freedom?  Do they really believe that a man-made law that brutally violates religious freedom and kills apostates is about religious freedom? That a law that protects heads of state from punishment for theft, robbery and murder (Codified Islamic Law Vol 3 – 914C, Hanafi law Hedaya page 188) is about religious freedom?

This does not even touch the issues that relate to women. The entire discourse in Qur’an on women is rights based but in Shari’ah, thanks to man-made laws based on concocted hadith literature, the entire discourse is duty based for women and right based for men, something which one found during period of jahiliyyah. It was too hard for men to accept equal dignity for men and women in the feudal society within which Shari’ah rules were compiled. Sharia rules harsh punishments including lashing and stoning to death for women’s voluntary sexual activities. And it’s because of these perceived elements of religious support, few Islamic governments dare to enact any criminal law to ban these barbaric practices against innocent girls.

I was in Geneva last year at the UNHRC to table a paper asking for honour killings to be declared an international criminal offence. The OIC which is primarily male, has blocked any mention of Islam or Muslims in the UN so it’s nearly impossible even as a Muslim woman to get a word in edgewise.

So, in the West, must we allow Female Genital Mutilation in the name of “religious freedom”? Of course not!  Islamists will tell you Female Genital Mutilation is not “Islamic but cultural”; it has at least nine roots in secondary Islamic scriptures and man-made law.

The question we must ask ourselves is why are we allowing a parallel legal system to even find  support in the West?

These are important questions with obvious answers. No, we cannot support religious practices that violate human rights. Sharia law as it exists today, violates human rights. That is why it is not acceptable as a manifestation of religion. It kills its followers’ natural instinct to relate to others, dehumanizing those who differ from them. Muslim women are its primary victims. It has destroyed countless lives, brought Islam a bad name, and launched the worst cultural assault on human civilization.

Are we going to look sideways when our women are murdered in the name of honour?

According to a government report, 4,000 women were killed in Pakistan in the name of honour between 1998 and 2003. In a study of female deaths in Alexandria, Egypt, 47 per cent of the women were killed by a relative after the woman had been raped. In Jordan and Lebanon, 70 to 75 per cent of the perpetrators of these so-called “honour killings” are the women’s brothers but the law of Quisas (or retribution) allows the heirs to pardon the murderer – so the father, for example, can pardon a son who kills his sister.

But here is the shocker – part of Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code states that “he who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty and in Pakistan, the Hudood ordinance does not punish the rapist until the woman can provide four male witnesses.

It is on record that the Sharia-lovers in the West are doing nothing to stop the terrible violence against Jews and Christians in Muslim countries. Yet in the West their tactic is to get support of ill-informed Jewish and Christian leaders. That gives the establishment of Sharia law a false credibility of “Interfaith action”, a term that has now been tainted. A mix of what I call “liberal white guilt” combined with ignorance of the details and a false understanding of multiculturalism, has given Islamists a wide berth to infiltrate governments and organizations, where they relentlessly pursue their subversive agenda.

There would be no point in having travelled thousands of miles to come and simply share the problem with you – a problem some of you are aware of. I would also like to table some solutions.

In sum, the recent discussion of shariah by Muslim radicals and non-Muslims has been overly politicized, overly-simplified, and, in my view, has become demagogic. According to my friend Hasan Mahmud, who is a researcher with the Deen Research Center  and an on expert on sharia law, this is what Western countries need to do.

Mahmud writes:

A constitution is a constitution only when it recognises the limit of religious freedom and protects its citizens. The ban on using Sharia law in State courts in the USA perfectly complies with the constitution because it bans not Islam but the violent interpretation of Islam. The first major conspiracy against the spirit of Islam was when the sharia lovers changed the meaning of the word Sharia from Ethical Guidance to State Law. For Westerners Islam and Sharia law became synonymous. Many Muslims have since childhood been indoctrinated with the belief that the sharia has the force of absolute law. Which is why it is so important to break the artificial attachment between Islam and Sharia law. Islam without political Sharia law existed for centuries from Sind to Indonesia. Unbelievable it may seem to some Westerners, that traditional Islam is tolerant, peaceful, gender-just and pluralistic. Unlike Sharia law it does not play hide-and seek with scriptures. Its theological base is much stronger than that of Sharia law. It is the strongest weapon in the battle against Sharia doctrine. Lest we forget Sharia-doctrine is the informal constitution of Radical Islam.

This perception is reinforced by a remarkable incident in Florida, where a local magistrate, Judge Richard Neilsen, ordered at the beginning of March that shariah-based arbitration should be recommended by the state authorities in a civil dispute between a Shia mosque, the Islamic Education Center of Tampa, and four members removed from its board of trustees.

An Islamic scholar in Texas decided that the quartet had been dropped from the board unjustly. In a ridiculous display of patronizing rhetoric presumably intended to flatter the Muslims and assure them of his goodwill, Judge Neilsen commented: “Islamic brothers should attempt to resolve a dispute among themselves. If Islamic brothers are unable to do so, they can agree to present the dispute to the greater community of Islamic brothers within the mosque or the Muslim community for resolution.”

The Shia mosque, however, rejected the adoption by the American court of shariah guidelines in their dispute, arguing through their attorney, Paul Thanasides, as follows: “The mosque believes wholeheartedly in the Koran and its teachings . They certainly follow Islamic law in connection with their spiritual endeavors. But with respect to secular endeavors, they believe Florida law should apply in Florida courts.”

For Muslims living in a non-Muslim country, this is an exemplary position to take. Dr Asghar Ali Engineer from the Center for Secular Studies advises:

Today it is highly necessary to dust off our own face and restore dignity of Islamic shari’ah by re-thinking several issues pertaining to personal laws restoring dignity and rights of women as given by Qur’an and taken away due to personal opinions of jurists in their own circumstances.  Imitation should be thrown out of window and all eminent jurists from entire Islamic world should come together and compile corpus of laws giving equal rights to women in matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc.