SEEING SHARIA'S RESURGENCE— MUSLIM ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, POPULAR SENTIMENT, AND FEARS

Wael B. Hallaq,— former James McGill Professor of Islamic Law at McGill University (and currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University), has acknowledged that a “fundamental feature” of traditional Islam's resurgence, is the constant and consistent popular call to restore the Sharia (which he identifies as “the religious law of Islam”)..

Hallaq further maintains that,

During the past two and a half decades, this call has grown ever more forceful, generating religious movements, a vast amount of literature, and affecting world politics. There is no doubt that Islamic law today is a significant cornerstone in the reaffirmation of Islamic identity, not only as a matter of positive law but also, and more importantly, as the foundation of a cultural uniqueness. Indeed, for many of today's Muslims, to live by Islamic law is not merely a legal issue, but one that is distinctly psychological.⁵⁶

Of course, being a champion of the “postcolonial,” pseudoacademic drivel popularized by the late Edward Said,⁵⁷ Hallaq, as an axiom, blames Western imperialist bogeymen, almost exclusively (if mindlessly) for this intrinsic Muslim—and Islamic—sharia “revival” phenomenon.⁵⁸

The twentieth century, starting by the mid-1920s, witnessed sincere, but ultimately doomed, secularization experiments aimed at de-politicizing, if not de-sacralizing the sharia in Republican Turkey, Iran, and later, Pakistan. Secular autocrats—Ataturk in Republican Turkey, the Pahlavi Shahs in Iran—made brutal attempts to abrogate the primacy of the sharia's legal jurisdiction altogether, while largely secular Pakistani ruling elites attempted to use an extraordinarily elastic interpretation of traditional “ijtihad,” or deductive Islamic legal reasoning, combined with historical apologetics, to forge a “modernist sharia,” ostensibly comporting with Western human-rights standards.⁵⁹ Inevitably, however, consistent with the deep-seated, conservative Islamic religious sentiments of the Muslim masses in all these countries, traditional sharia has reemerged, triumphant.⁶⁰ Even Turkey, literally within a decade of Ataturk's death in 1938, began its inexorable Islamic resurgence, as chronicled with striking prescience by historian Uriel Heyd, in 1968.— By the end of the 1970s, Iran was fully “restored” to a Shi'ite theocracy,⁶² and Pakistan to a de facto Sunni sharia state,⁶³ while the burgeoning influence of Turkey's pious Muslim masses —already apparent then—has culminated in the popular election of fundamentalist, sharia-supporting regimes under Erbakan, and subsequently his acolyte, Erdogan.⁶⁴

Repeated survey data from the world's largest Muslim nations, and even Muslim communities within the West, as well as the ongoing, aggressive Organization of the Islamic Conference campaign to constrain all international human rights within an overarching “sharia-complaint” framework, make plain that the traditional Islamic jihad imperative to impose the sharia, globally, is a disturbing present-day reality.⁶⁵

Polling data released April 24, 2007, from a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of

4,384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006, and February 15, 2007—1,000 Moroccans, 1,000 Egyptians, 1,243 Pakistanis, and 1,141 Indonesians—

revealed that 65.2 percent of those interviewed—almost two-thirds, hardly a “fringe minority”—desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”), including 49 percent of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims.

About eight-in-ten Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan (82% each) endorse the stoning of people who commit adultery; 70% of Muslims in Jordan and 56% of Nigerian Muslims share this view. Muslims in Pakistan and Egypt are also the most supportive of whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery; 82% in Pakistan and 77% in Egypt favor making this type of punishment the law in their countries, as do 65% of Muslims in Nigeria and 58% in Jordan. When asked about the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion, at least three-quarters of Muslims in Jordan (86%), Egypt (84%) and Pakistan (76%) say they would favor making it the law; in Nigeria, 51% of Muslims favor and 46% oppose it.⁶⁸*

Such irredentist attitudes are shared to an alarming extent by an important Muslim immigrant community in the West—British Muslims. A poll of six hundred British Muslim college students revealed that one-third support killing in the name of Islam, while 40 percent want to the sharia to replace British law.⁶⁹ And sharia indoctrination of British Muslim youth begins well before college entry. A BBC Panorama investigation has revealed the presence in Britain of forty “weekend schools” attended by some five thousand Muslim children aged 6-18. These schools teach the British Muslim youth who attend them, for example, traditional Islamic motifs of Jew-hatred and mutilating sharia punishments—as per the Saudi National Curriculum—under the rubric of “Saudi Students Clubs and Schools in the UK and Ireland.”⁷⁰ The BBC revelations validate prescient warnings made almost two decades earlier by the late respected British scholar of Islam, Dr.

A proseltyzing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole humanity will be one Muslim community, the “Umma.”⁷⁴

The “urbane,” “moderate” Muslim Badawi's “vision” for British society—so recently deemed unthinkable— now seems eminently plausible, as Britain appears well on its way to full integration into the obscurantist Muslim umma, rife with traditional Islamic Jew-hatred, and all other aspects of sharia-sanctioned, totalitarian barbarity.

Viewed in this context, the global sharia-promoting Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) agenda simply embodies the desires of its individual Muslim constituencies. The 1990 Cairo Declaration, or so- called Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, was drafted and subsequently ratified by all the Muslim member nations of the OIC.

24], “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia”; and [article 25] “The Islamic sharia is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the articles of this Declaration.”⁷⁸ The gravely negative implications of the QIC’s sharia-based Cairo Declaration are most apparent in its transparent rejection of freedom of conscience in Article 10, which proclaims:

Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion, or to atheism.⁷⁹

Ominously, articles 19 and 22 reiterate a principle stated elsewhere throughout the document, which clearly applies to the “punishment” of so-called apostates from Islam:

There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Sharia. Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia.

Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia.

Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith⁸⁰

Following the initial printing of the banal, if now- infamous Danish “Muhammad cartoons,”⁸¹ QIC secretary general Ihsanoglu had denounced “the publication of blasphemous and insulting caricatures of Prophet Muhammad.”⁸² He concluded that this “Islamophobic” act of “sacrilege” somehow contravened “international principles, values, and ethics enshrined in the various resolutions and declarations of the United Nations.”⁸³ These sentiments of Ihsanoglu (and the OIC he represents) were reiterated more brazenly by the influential Qatari Sheikh Yusuf al- Qaradawi during a sermon which aired February 3, 2006.— Qaradawi demanded action from the United Nations in accord with purely Islamic, sharia-based conceptions of “blasphemy”:

the governments [of the world] must be pressured to demand that the U.N.

Indeed the OIC, which clearly shares Sheikh Qaradawi's viewpoint, has vigorously promoted⁸⁶ the UN Defamation of Religions Resolution,⁸⁷ which would give international sanction to sharia-based criminalization of “blasphemy.”

These frightening global trends have alarmed a remarkably brave and vocal, but distinctively miniscule, cadre of Muslim intellectuals. In a brilliant, dispassionate modern analysis,⁸⁸ Ibn Warraq described fourteen characteristics of “Ur Fascism” as enumerated by Umberto Eco,⁸⁹ analyzing their potential relationship to the major determinants of Islamic governance and aspirations, through the present. He adduces salient examples which reflect the key attributes discussed by Eco: the unique institution of jihad war; the establishment of a Caliphate⁹⁰ under “Allah's vicegerent on earth,” the Caliph—ruled by sharia, which has always featured a rigid system of subservience and sacralized discrimination against non­Muslims and Muslim women, devoid of basic freedoms of conscience, and expression. Warraq's assessment confirms what G.-H. Bousquet⁹¹ concluded (in 1950) from his career studying the historical development and implementation of Islamic law.

The harsh, but sound and intellectually honest, criticisms leveled against the sharia by courageous freethinkers such as Ibn Warraq,— Ayaan Hirsi Ali,⁹³ and Wafa Sultan⁹⁴—to this day deemed “apostates” by the dominant obscurantist mainstream Muslim religio- political hierarchy—have been echoed by those still identified as “valid” Muslims. Most recently (in November 2010), for example, the pious Shi'ite former Iraqi MP Sayyed Ayad Jamal Al-Din, made these candid remarks contrasting modern human rights and liberties, which he recognized as having uniquely Western origins, with Islamic sharia-based conceptions of human rights—epitomized by the rule of the Taliban for Sunni Muslims, and the current Iranian regime for Shi'ites.

Under the rule of Islam, there is no equality among people. Absolutely not. A Muslim is not like a dhimmi [i.e., a non-Muslim vanquished by jihad, and living under the Sharia, as per Koran 9:29 and related Muslim jurisprudence]. The term dhimmi embodies a great deal of scorn and contempt. It is as if the Christian is saying: “I am under your protection, under your thumb.” This is what it means.. The notion of civic identity is based on equality in duties and rights, but under the rule of Islam, Muslims and non-Muslims are not equal—neither in their duties, nor in their rights..

The late regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan was a pure Sunni Islamic rule. A clear Shiite regime is that of the Jurisprudent Ruler, who claims to be substituting the Prophet Muhammad, and.He is Allah upon the Earth, more or less.

Whoever wants the rule of the shari’a should turn to the Taliban government or to the Ayatollah’s government in Iran. Or else he should select [the] Western.human rights and the notion of liberties. These human rights do not exist in Islam.⁹⁵