Shari'a law Archives
April 28, 2007
What's Wrong with the World?--U.S. Sharia watch 1
What's wrong with the world? Well, we could start here, with the development of a school that is just inches away, as it were, from being a madrassa, in Brooklyn, NY, as a public school. It will be language-intensive in Arabic, focus on "Muslim culture," and be run by a woman beloved of CAIR. She is especially concerned to let us know that her school won't shy away from "sensitive issues" in the world, like the plight of the Palestinians and "colonialism."
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May 30, 2007
Islam: You can check out any time you like, but you just can't leave
Lina Joy has been denied the right to be legally deemed a Christian by Malaysia's highest court. The court affirmed precedents according to which all ethnic Malays are Muslim, in which case a sharia court must decide whether or not they can convert to Christianity. The sharia courts, of course, apply Muslim law, according to which conversion is not allowed. Lina is a baptized Christian, but the government will not remove "Muslim" from her identity papers. This means that she cannot marry the Christian man she desires to marry. It also means that sharia courts continue to have jurisdiction over her. Not surprisingly, her lawyer (who happens to be a Muslim) has received death threats for representing her. Malaysia's constitution ostensibly guarantees freedom of religion--but not if you were "born Muslim," I guess. Lina has (graciously) been allowed to change her name from the Muslim one she was given at birth.
HT: Dhimmi Watch and TROP
Next time you hear something like, "Muslims in the West would like the opportunity to be governed by their own laws in family matters" or "Canadians are opposed to the limited application of sharia law even if it is only for Muslims," consider the implications of the fact that you can't leave Islam. What is really aimed at in such initiatives is the situation in Malaysia: The "secular" government deems certain people to be Muslim from birth and then, dutifully applying sharia law "to Muslims" refuses to let them leave that religion in legal fact, referring all matters of family law and the like, including marriages, to sharia courts for such people throughout their entire lives, even against their will.
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July 24, 2007
The Jihad-sedition law.
My call last week for a Jihad-sedition law stirred up a hornet’s nest. While it was not a new idea, I often forget that what is old hat to me may be new and shocking to others. I also must take some blame for some misinterpretations — because the simple fact is that my writing, in one paragraph in particular, was a convoluted mess.
So here, in legal and more precise language, is what I propose:
July 28, 2007
And now for some good news
Today, something that is right with the world:
From browsing Compass Direct News Service, I have just learned (rather late in the game) that Christian convert Bahaa El-Akkad was released at the end of April from highly unpleasant imprisonment in Egypt.
August 15, 2007
Metanarrative and Enemy Combatants
James Poulos, who blogs at Postmodern Conservative and The American Scene, has, in his own words, taken part-time employment as a critic of "our general cultural retreat into the therapeutic meta-ethics of feeling, emotion, and sense - and away from the ethics of fact, act, and responsibility". Critiquing a NYT article on US-Saudi relations which stated that the American officials had consented to interviews in advance of a diplomatic junket in order to "send a pointed signal of deep frustration", Poulos wrote:
No, ladies and gentlemen. The officials were clearly intent on actually expressing deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course. (snip) We must cease this constant retreat into meta-narrative. We must insist upon discussing the world where actual actions take place. We must resist the half-conscious urge to make feelings and feints, interpretations and intimations, more important than the behaviors that call them into 'being.' We must stop reading entrails and issuing oracles.
In other words, the US did not send a signal of frustration; they simply expressed it, period. The metanarrative of signals and signs adds nothing but a layer of opaque, baroque ritual, obfuscating what actually transpired.
October 13, 2007
A Miscellany of Aggravation
While touring the blogosphere rather aimlessly this morning, it seemed as though everything I read was destined to occasion aggravation. The first three articles I happened upon left me 0-for-3 in the reader-satisfaction department. At a suitable level of abstraction, there may even exist a common thread, perhaps something like, 'obliviousness to the obvious.'
The first item, Bradford Plumer's endorsement of a Sentencing Project critique of sentencing guidelines, contained this nugget of incomprehension:
The second striking bit comes when Mauer compares U.S. sentences with those abroad. Burglars now serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England.
December 10, 2007
Not Ready for Civilization, part II
Via Lawrence Auster, a report that Muslim militias in Basra, soon to undergo a complete transition back to local governance, are threatening Christian women who have hitherto declined to wear the veil or burqa.
Actually, the "not ready for civilization" part could apply equally well to America and Britain themselves, inasmuch they embarked upon an unjust war, which they sought to justify by appeal to multifarious fraudulent pretexts, ideological, evidentiary, and material, which war has had as its entirely foreseeable consequence the grievous and irreversible destruction of indigenous Christian communities. They do not "make a desert and call it peace"; no, they do worse: they unleash evil and laud themselves for having done good, and connive at gross injustice and wallow in the pretense of virtue.
February 7, 2008
The House Swept Clean
I've spent the better part of the afternoon hours, or at least the spare moments thereof, vainly endeavouring to come up with something semi-profound to say about the news that Rowan Williams has called for the implementation of sharia law in Britain.
Alas, all eloquence and percipience have departed me.
It is not that I am astonished. To the contrary, where the Archbishop of Canterbury is concerned, nothing really occasions surprise; the man is a living reproof to the facile belief that wisdom correlates with an individual's native intellectual endowment. In fact, a coworker printed out a copy of the article and presented it to me this morning, adding that it would cause my head to explode. This sort of thing occasionally astonishes him - in fact, he still finds unfathomable the fact that Sayyid Qtub was profoundly scandalized by - wait for it - square dancing. Likewise, an archbishop advocating the implementation of sharia law elicits expressions of stupefaction. Perhaps, then, it is a testament to my cynicism that I received the news with equanimity. "What took him so long?", I wondered silently.
Several things are noteworthy, though none of them is really new. First, those enamored of the liberal settlement, the notion that each is entitled to fashion for himself an identity from whatever fragments fall to hand, and that no inherited tradition should interpose itself between an individual and his self-posited ends, really do, in the final analysis, reject the inheritance of Western civilization. They may not do so explicitly; in fact, most do not - but all this means is that the liberal order is parasitic upon the carcass of Christendom, presupposing its benefits while devouring the substance that would enable its reproduction. In other words, liberal individualism and all of its derivatives, including the ethos of toleration and inclusiveness, presuppose the Christian conception of the person, yet isolate, abstract, and elevate it as a metaphysical absolute. Liberalism ideologizes a dissociated fragment of Christianity, and thus sweeps clean the house of Christian remnants, disdaining these as relics of intolerance and exclusion.
February 13, 2008
Funniest take on the Rowan Williams/Sharia Controversy
Via Rod Dreher, Iowahawk immortalizes the temporizing of the Archbishop of Canterbury in verse. Any of a sensitive disposition should be forewarned that there are occasional crudities, but otherwise, well, I split my sides laughing.
An excerpt:
41 Sayth the libertine, "'tis well and goode42 But sharia goes now where nae it should;
43 I liketh bigge buttes and I cannot lye,
44 You othere faelows can't denye,
45 But the council closed my wenching pub,
46 To please the Imams, aye thaere's the rub."
47 Sayeth the Bishop, strokynge his chin,
48 "To the Mosque-man, sexe is sinne
49 So as to staye in his goode-graces
50 Cover well thy wenches' faces
51 And abstain ye Chavs from ribaldry
52 Welcome him to our communitie."
March 18, 2008
The Weak Reeds That Pierce Our Hands
From time to time, I entertain a sort of running dialogue - with myself. No, I'm not crazy, at least not yet. What I am attempting to do in that dialogue is persuade myself that Western leaders and opinion makers could not betray the West, by incremental steps sometimes imperceptible, into the clutches of our adversaries - not by means of some nefarious conspiracy, but in consequence of their own imbecilic fantasies and delusions. Some part of me, cynical and melancholy though I am, is desirous that there occur no apocalypse of liberalism.
Alas, I believe that I'm am losing that argument with my pessimistic instincts, which suggest to me that, when the moment arrives, our leaders will sooner turn intolerant towards us, and our cultures, than acknowledge that, say, Islam is not a religion of peace.
Joseph Loconte, writing in the Weekly Standard of the film being prepared by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, you see, engages in the stereotypical hand-wringing and cleverer-than-the-messenger, who-should-be-shot posturing, which performance summons up all of those dark thoughts. His article is illustrative of everything that is wrong with the elite commentariat in the West, and why we cannot now rely upon them in this regard, and why they will likely continue to fail us.
August 7, 2008
Your Daily Reminder...
...That the presence of Muslims in any non-Islamic society is the condition of the inevitability of their attempt to establish sharia as normative:
Manifestly, this fellow is deluded as to the intentions of Europeans; the publication of the cartoons that served as the pretext for riots and protests was not a calculated strategy on the part of Europeans, an attempt to provoke the Muslims to such wrath that there would obtain a pretext for the mass expulsion of 30 million followers of Mahomet. Nevertheless, his advice to Muslims in Europe - keep on the down low, pursue respectable careers and lives, so as to better propagate Islam - is shrewd counsel indeed.
(HT: Evan McLaren)
September 15, 2008
Sharia Law Comes to the U.K.
Via Rod Dreher, Sharia courts, the judgments of which are enforceable through the established legal system, have been established in several British cities.
The emergence of such paradoxically parallel yet established Islamic legal systems is a threat several orders of magnitude more severe than that of mere terrorist attacks, for the latter, by their very barbarity, summon forth resistance and denunciation, while the former, by insinuating themselves into the dense skein of civil society, become parts of society without which it is no longer possible to think of that society. They become, in another paradox, organic, woven into the very tapestry of order, of relationships, of societal customs, their very obscenity enabled by the enfeebling multiculturalist dogmas of our age. The more contradictory, the more monstrous the Other is - if I might paraphrase Lawrence Auster - the more we feel ourselves obliged to incorporate that Other into our civilizational substance.
No war on distant shores will deliver us from this threat; it is a threat that can only be addressed by means of domestic action, domestic reforms. We of the West must change ourselves, and not, as Dick Cheney would have it, change them, because we will not change ourselves.
November 28, 2008
Muslim persecution of Christian converts. It's no cartoon.
This is the cover of a downloadable book on the persecution of Christian converts from Islam in Muslim countries. It is worth reading.
It is just amazing to me that people who claim offense over a cartoon can turn a blind eye, or perhaps in some cases lend a hand, to the inhumane persecution of those who freely walk away from the Muslim faith.
October 24, 2009
On Choosing One's Battles
Far be it from me to inveigh against The American Conservative for any light and transient cause, especially after defending the redoubtable Daniel Larison in these pages (though he is more than capable of defending himself), but a couple of TAC's contributors have managed to lash themselves into a tizzy over Nick Griffin, and his recent appearance on the BBC, as well as Geert Wilders, who was finally permitted to enter the UK.
First, David Lindsay expressed his support for the initial ban, and then proceeded to opine that the ban should be extended to other ideological undesirables likely to disturb the public tranquility:
I fully supported the ban on Geert Wilders from visiting Britain, as he was finally permitted to do this week. He is in the Pim Fortuyn tradition of opposing Islam so that the Netherlands can remain a drug-addled, whore-mongering country where the age of consent is 12, contrary to the wishes of its general public either in the staunchly Protestant north or in the devoutly Catholic south. That is not any West which I for one wish to defend. But then, it is not in fact the West at all. It is only the most extreme, and in that sense logically consistent, manifestation of the pseudo-West proclaimed by the neoconservative movement, or what’s left of it these days.
I could perceive this as a reasonable criticism of Wilders, as he does seem to defend a sort of Netherlands that no conservative should be keen to uphold. But questions stubbornly persist. Is it possible, politically speaking, to prioritize either the struggle against hedonistic liberalism or the struggle against Islamic immigration, regarding one as more exigent at this moment? After all, transforming the decadent Dutch culture would be a multi-generational project, mainly apolitical in nature, while turning round the immigration problem could be accomplished straightaway were there any will to do so. Is it not obvious, moreover, that the reasons for the initial ban of Wilders were that his presence in the UK might inflame the Muslim mobs, and that his message would fall afoul of Islamophilic sentiment in the establishment? It is all well and good to advocate the banning of hedonists, but that is not what happened.
Dear reader, there is yet more.