Sharia and the Perverted Notion of Religious Law

I remember talking to a Muslim friend around the time when Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh began fulminating against “sharia law” over the airwaves, shouting about the ways by which it is affecting Americans. My friend said to me: “When we heard about all these ‘sharia law’ scandals in the right-wing news, we were just as surprised as the rest of the world.”

Sharia is the same type of set of “religious laws...found in all three of the monotheistic religions,” writes Abdullah Saeed in his The Qur’an: An Introduction. (Saeed  162) But because some more vociferous adherents have radicalized and perverted the values of the Qur’an, the law itself has been slapped with negative epithets and a oft-inaccurate representation in the mainstream media.

The sacred texts of each of the other two Abrahamic religions are plagued with some offensive (and, frankly, vulgar) passages: The Old Testament’s book of Deuteronomy advocates the stoning of a rebellious son. In the New Testament, St. Paul advises Christians not to permit a woman to be in a position of authority over a man.

To the vast majority of followers of these religions, the “law” acts as an aspirational guideline. A Jewish family’s observe halakha to the best of their abilities. On a tangible level, this kind of observance manifests itself in actions like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. For certain sects of Christians, such an observance may come through in attendance of church services, participating in Lent, or giving to the poor.

Obviously, I can only fit an extraordinarily simplistic explication of this thought in a brief blogpost, but here goes:

I believe that the laws of religious antiquity – sharia, halakha, and anything in between – are better left for practice on an individual and local communal level, rather than a governmental or mass regional level. Texts must be read in context as readers engage in the hermeneutic process. Writes Saeed: “Qur’anic texts from which many instructional teachings are derived often appear to relate to a specific cultural setting.” (Saeed  170) The modern State of Israel has encountered strains between Ultra-Orthodox and secular policymakers in influencing policy. And while the issue seems to have fallen somewhat from the spotlight, Mitt Romney’s adamant Mormonism was an obstruction in his path to the nomination, and affairs of church and state have long bred tensions in governance. God’s prohibitions (in Islam, “harrama” [Saeed  164]) should be taken seriously, but not imposed on an entire metropolitan society or political province.