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Sharia Law: The answer to all America's problems

by William K. Wolfrum 9/20/2010 - 9:54 am   |

It’s time for Sharia Law to come to the United States. This nation has settled into a moral and economic funk that only a healthy dose of Sharia Law can fix.

Oh sure, you’ve probably heard lots of bad things about Sharia Law. You probably think that it’s an Islamic plot to overthrow the world and control humanity. But this information – provided to you by the likes of Newt Gingrich – is based on ignorance and bigotry.

Here are just a few examples of how Sharia Law will make things better for everyone:

  • Getting stoned will finally be legalized.
  • Free Cake on Wednesdays.
  • Ramadan will cure national obesity epidemic, and work off all that cake.
  • A whole new “Veil Industry” will provide good jobs for Americans.
  • Automatic weapons will be available at gas stations.
  • People who can’t dance will no longer feel ashamed.
  • And much, much more!

So, am I suggesting that the U.S. be ruled by Sharia Law? Hell yes I am! Trust me on this, it would be a non-stop cake party. And America would regain its place as the greatest nation in the history of nations.

Of course, there’s no chance in hell Sharia Law will become the law of the land in the U.S. But if you’re going to be ignorant about something that will never happen, why not pretend it’s a great thing rather than be terrified of it?

–WKW

Crossposted at WIlliam K. Wolfrum Chronicles

About time.

M...m...m...m...MY Sharia!

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=17942293

by quinn esq 9/20/2010 - 10:31 am

Musical geniuses, those guys!

And Wolfie, I'll weigh in with my standard objection that it's sharia, not sharia law. Sharia already means "Islamic law," so the word "law" is redundant. Aside from that, though, your proposal makes a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, songs by The Knack would be banned. Enjoy them while you can.

by acanuck 9/20/2010 - 1:13 pm (re: quinn esq)

It's like when McArdle writes "all else ceteris paribus."

by DF 9/20/2010 - 1:17 pm (re: acanuck)

Says the man from the state that brings us The La Brea Tar Pits.

by Orlando 9/21/2010 - 9:20 am (re: DF)

It has come to our attention that one "Tim Johnson" is wearing a wire.  You've been made, Mr. "Johnson" - if that is your real name.  The pertinent questions now are:

by DF 9/20/2010 - 1:09 pm

Rachid's working Clash street. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DbFYsi9iSg

by quinn esq 9/20/2010 - 6:01 pm (re: DF)

Actually in a place like a wild place like anarchy-ridden Somalia where Sharia is "the only law west of the Pecos", it works pretty well, (women can walk home from shopping without getting raped sort of thing) without the need of a sophisticated state system to back it up. If anybody in Washington really cared about bringing some sort of law and order to what we call "failed states" they would be supporting Sharia, not dissing it.

by David Seaton 9/20/2010 - 3:21 pm

It works pretty well except when it doesn't.  Sharia might look pleasant next to the life of refugees, but lets remember we're talking about people who are refugees in their own country and that it is the very same people who advocate Sharia as the law of the land who perpetrate these conditions on their own people.  You're basically arguing that submitting to theocracy is preferable to being totally oppressed and physically abused by it.  Down that road lies madness.

by DF 9/20/2010 - 3:53 pm (re: David Seaton)

I'm with DF here.  Somalia has one of the highest rates of female genital mutilation in the world, if not the highest, which is a concomitant of the system of social ordering you're advocating in that country.  Authoritarian patriarchy is not a good thing, imo, and I seem to recall on this page someone deploring the authoritarian tendency.

by Articleman 9/20/2010 - 4:18 pm (re: David Seaton)

Some really awful stuff gets done in the guise of sharia, much of it directed against women -- genital mutilation and stoning for sexual lapses for starters. Then there are barbarities like destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas. Banning of music and kite-flying. Execution of people for watching soccer on TV. Are these mainstream sharia or aberrations?

One thing to remember is that, though it's often talked about as a single, immutable body of laws, sharia is anything but. Since at least the end of the caliphate, Islam has no central religious authority (think Catholicism with no pope or Vatican). Historically and geographically, what passes for orthodoxy has had a wide range of interpretations.

For example, most Muslim scholars agree that wearing the niqab or burqa is not a religious requirement. But local customs, which often predate Islam, can make that point moot. Still, the niqab is banned at Al-Azhar University, at the heart of Sunni orthodoxy.

Even avowed fundamentalists can clash over local traditions, as when bin Laden's Arab fighters would denounce the Afghan mujaheddin as idolaters for putting flowers on tombs of the fallen. The Saudis instead buried their dead in unmarked desert graves.

I'm trying to make one small point here: we in the West should guard against making blanket condemnations of sharia on the basis of its harshest applications. That way lies Gingrich-like madness.

On the other hand, I don't want any niches carved out in our legal systems for any religious-based laws. Not that I've heard anyone in the United States advocating for that. Wolfrum doesn't count.

by acanuck 9/20/2010 - 6:36 pm (re: Articleman)

It was David who raised Somalia, and my comment is directly responsive to it. 

I took a class on international human rights norms in law school, and the class was roughly evenly divided between those who would support cultural relativist defenses of practices that violate human rights norms, and those who would impose human rights norms at the expense of the moral relativist defense of the challenged practices. 

I was and am in the latter group that views certain abuses as moral absolutes (which you treat as extremes everyone can agree are bad, so far so good) and not defensible with reference to cultural relativism.  That's just how I roll.  It's not a very Gingrichy notion.

by Articleman 9/20/2010 - 7:04 pm (re: acanuck)

I sorta knew that was where you stood. Call me a relativist, but I do draw the line at "imposing" human rights norms. Partly because I know what that often comes down to in practice: changing foreigners' practices by killing large numbers of them. That's where "moral absolutes" kick in for me.

Especially since the norms we're using as justification are themselves so relative. Roll back the clock 25, 50, 100 years and see where our society stood on women's rights, children's rights, homosexuals' rights. Just a century and a half ago, your country labeled some human beings as property, to be disposed of on a whim. Back a bit more, and people were being tortured as a form of trial and burned at the stake for heresy and witchcraft.

I'm happy that much of that has changed, and that most of the world adheres at least aspirationally to our western human-rights goals. But let's show a little humility. We weren't always so righteous, and in fact there's been some backsliding recently. You can't waterboard and preach at the same time.

by acanuck 9/20/2010 - 8:31 pm (re: Articleman)

I don't personally waterboard, I don't know about you.  And crediting your collective responsibility thing all the way, I don't know what kind of argument that is to forbear from asserting broadly rights against torture, and against female genital mutilation, on the grounds that it's imperialist or such.  

Seems like the real imperialism at play is the complicity in violation of those norms in coddling or abjuring violators.  Either way, the West has power.  In one scenario, it's humble enough to do business as usual, in another, it's arrogant enough to try to be better than that.  Touche, mon frere.  :)

by Articleman 9/21/2010 - 12:14 am (re: acanuck)

Sure, throughout history there have been periods where the operational norms degerated well beneath anything that could be considered moral - indeed finally the societies themselves recoiled in horror and threw the practices off. But if you roll back the clock farther, you find time and time again a certain level of civilization rises and to a greater or lesser extent the actions recognized as morally transendant in the present day were viewed as equally abhorrant. So to me it certainly seems like there is a chain, broken at times, where a deeper humanity does assert itself along reasonably consistent lines. This more applies to violations of one's physical being - like genital mutilation - than to power and work relationships (like slavery, which is pretty consistent throughout history until just recently ... our era seems to have evolved on that one, so now future civilizations will be able to point back to us when determining their own relationship to relativist morality on that).

But it's kind of a big jump to go from saying there are some things that transcend moral relativism and saying that implicitly means the only response is killing a bunch of foreigners to change their practice. That seems a whole other significant part of the equation; to what extent, if any, does one's moral code require them to intervene and correct actions that are clearly just depraved? I think everyone pretty much agrees Hitler had to be stopped. At the other end of the spectrum you have this sort of evangelical democracy brought to nations at the barrel of a gun that seems so attractive to ... well, evangelicals.

by kgb999 9/21/2010 - 2:33 am (re: acanuck)

I'm cool with intervening militarily to stop genocide. I wish we had in Rwanda. Lesser of two evils: some people will die, but hopefully fewer than if no intervention occurred. (And yes, we did act to stop Hitler, but it was his territorial aggression, not his genocide, that spurred action. The genocide was barely a blip on the Allies' radar.)

As for genital mutilation, Jews, Muslims and many Christians practise a form of this. Where's the high moral ground? "Our variety of genital mutilation is morally acceptable; yours is not"? Bullshit.

I've seen arguments about liberating women trotted out throughout the GWOT. I recall Bush claiming, after Baghdad fell, that Iraqi women could now walk the streets without burqas. Total nonsense. Women played important roles in Saddam's Iraq; the occupation empowered the precise groups that wanted to force them off the job market and back into burqas.

And building schools for girls in Afghanistan? Totally cynical exploitation. By making these girls symbols and PR pawns, we've only made them targets. I suspect most are scared shitless, especially knowing that the Taliban know western troops will begin drawing down as early as next year.

I find stoning people to death barbaric. But I'm also no fan of hanging, guillotining, firing squads, the gas chamber, the electric chair and yes, even lethal injection. Like I said, could we find a little humility and drop the rationalization that our way of doing horrible things is superior to your way of doing horrible things?

by acanuck 9/21/2010 - 4:20 am (re: kgb999)

Not that a-man needs anybody to argue for him, but I think his point in one of the comments above was that he was speaking on his own behalf and not on behalf of his government or society. I, for one, am also no fan of capital punishment and torture AND I find Sharia barbaric. In Aceh, the northernmost province in Sumatra, Sharia is observed. The rest of Indonesia is, for the most part, an eclectic hodgepodge of religious diversity living in sometimes uneasy proximity and making it work somehow. In Aceh, the religious police stalk young women who are covered from head to toe (although not in burqas) to tell them their pants are too tight and they shouldn't be standing so close to men on the street. Yeah, that isn't as bad as Sharia in parts of the Middle East, but I don't think it's because the men who hold power in Aceh are more reasonable. Rather, I think it's because the larger Indonesia society won't accept it and they have a central government to deal with. But it's not an overwhelmingly strong central government and if it falters, who knows what will happen in Aceh and in other areas heavily populated by Muslims. 

And as for building schools for girls in Afghanistan being a PR ploy, I say, "More, please. And as soon as possible." Education and economic security are the only two things that have every raised the status of women in society and likely the only things that ever will. Without access to education, women in Afghanistan are pretty much doomed.

by Orlando 9/21/2010 - 9:35 am (re: acanuck)

I'd suggest the education of Afghan women (boys, too) is much like the training of Afghan troops and police: mostly smoke and mirrors for western consumption. And by linking it in people's minds to a foreign occupation, we're hardly helping it take root.You do realize the modernization we're trying to impose on Afghanistan is nearly identical to what the Russians attempted, before the United States gave the "freedom fighters" Stinger missiles and helped them return the country to chaos?

by acanuck 9/21/2010 - 12:50 pm (re: Orlando)

Wait a minute. I'm not 100% sure of your point here, but let's all remember Afghanistan ... BEFORE the Russians attempted to "modernize" it. They didn't give a hoot about modernizing any more than we do. In fact, the whole reason there is no national military or any other institution of strong central government currently is because the USSR dismantled everything remotely associated with sovereign autonomy. You can't blame that on US stinger missiles.

By most accounts I've seen, the present-day chaos can be tracked to our failure maintain engagement and help the Afghan people rebuild in the vacuum created when the USSR left. This gave rise to the warped-ass psychos who managed to take over and ensure the nation stayed a backwards stew of dark-ages style abuses. This is compared to what Afghanistan itself once was, not some random dictate made from afar.

I'm not arguing that we should stay in Afghanistan. Nor am I arguing that we have not failed abjectly to stay on the right side of certain moral issues that I personally feel transcend the BS of relativism. As a society we have failed completely, and continue to fail. Again, my view is that occasionally the chain is broken. But, that is absolutely no justification for those in society to pretend as if this means we can excuse the inexcusable because abusive individuals are able to hold sway over populations from time to time. The ability to dominate a population doesn't suddenly turn the horrific into something moral.

And to be very clear, when we leave, the poor folks of Afghanistan are still going to be dominated by people who as a matter of policy engage in abuses of the sort that, IMO, can not exist in a society viewed as keeping with base human morals.

by kgb999 9/22/2010 - 12:43 am (re: acanuck)

I'd seen that Qayoumi FP article you cite, kgb, and actually recalled it as I wrote the sentence you object to. But even Qayoumi concedes the government publication he took those photos from might be "a little airbrushed." Yes, Afghan leaders made halting attempts at modernization in the '50s, '60s, and even earlier. But the image presented is skin-deep -- that's just Kabul. There was always resistance to reform in the hinterland. After homegrown Marxists seized power, they attempted even more radical reforms -- and provoked even fiercer resistance. I don't claim the Russians acted out of altruism once they sent in their army, but they did back the same basic policies.

I think you can blame the current chaos on the accumulated damage of three decades of war. The U.S., as you say, failed to help pick up the pieces after the Russians left. But Pakistan is guiltiest of all, its intelligence agencies having fostered, armed and funded the Taliban in order to keep Afghanistan as a client state.

I'm not trying to elevate the horrific into the moral. I'm saying we in the West should butt the hell out because we've only ever succeeded in making conditions there worse.

by acanuck 9/22/2010 - 4:10 am (re: kgb999)

You're equating male circumcision, which is a kind of inane custom but which has arguable hygienic purpose, with the desexing of women by the cutting of their clitoris.

That argument is self-refuting. 

And we agree about genocide, so the question is where to draw the line.

Not sure what it is about arguing about anything that has to do with foreign policy that results in the GWOT being laid at my feet every time. 

I do not agree that the US military presence in Afghanistan is to liberate women.  I do not support invading other nations to propagate American cultural norms.  It's a mark of how weak your position is that you need such straw men to fight.  International human rights norms are propagated in large part by the UN and international and diplomatic pressure.  You're the one bringing force into the equation, not me, your unavailing attempts to hang me with Dubya, the GWOT, and defenses of Af-Pak that I'm not making notwithstanding.

I find moral relativism that endorses the extreme subjugation of women as mere local folkways as repellent as you find American interventionism, notwithstanding that I'm generally not a champion of the latter either.

by Articleman 9/21/2010 - 12:42 pm (re: acanuck)

I'm not accusing you of invading other countries, waterboarding or even preaching, A-man. I accept you're making a sincere moral argument, not pandering like Newt. I just balk at claims of moral or institutional superiority being introduced into foreign policy discussions. Such claims, when govts reinforce them, are virtually always self-serving. And they often lead to terrible decisions.

I'm not endorsing female subjugation, extreme or otherwise. But you can't persuade societies to change age-old practices at gunpoint, and that's literally what we in the West are attempting right now. Education is obviously a better, cheaper way -- probably the only way. Functional literacy in Afghanistan might be as low as 15%. Suppose just a few of the billions we now spend on military hardware and logistics went into educating both men and women. But for that to work, we'd have to first decouple our educational aid from the occupation -- by ending it -- and that's where past bad decisions put us in a bind.

And if the Taliban reassert control and reject our help, as is likely, we have to let Afghanistan remain a backwater for a few more decades. There are plenty of countries where new schools and village water projects would be welcomed.

I believe you when you say you don't support invading other countries to impose our values. But we have and we are. So that's why I can't help bringing in the GWOT. As long as we stick to this failed way of doing things, of looking at the world, all our efforts are wasted.

by acanuck 9/21/2010 - 2:02 pm (re: Articleman)

I would say that if the Somalis have the unfortunate and disagreeable habit of clit-clipping, I would abstain from sending any daughter of mine to an expensive boarding school there... if there were any expensive boarding schools there and I had any daughters. Aside from that I would give Somalia a wide berth.

by David Seaton 9/21/2010 - 6:18 am (re: Articleman)

You'd think Canadians and Europeans would be a little more down with international human rights norms than that.  Maybe you should give a wider berth to the Israelis, David, if you don't mind half a country oppressing the other half after all.

by Articleman 9/21/2010 - 12:46 pm (re: David Seaton)

After all, the Israeli government is far more democratic than the Somali government, if all is relative.  Pithy.

by DF 9/21/2010 - 1:44 pm (re: Articleman)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqowmHgxVJQ

 

by Richard Day 9/20/2010 - 4:04 pm

I don't get what the wingers are so upset about.

Pick up trucks (and yay, with no seat belts!) for all the guys, and.barefoot and pregnant wimmins stuck in the kitchen. What's not to like? True that the beer thing could be a problem, however with something like that, it's not that hard to get yourself the right mullah with the right fatwas. Fatwas, they're a dime a dozen, and people like Pat Robertson already have lots of experience at them.

by artappraiser 9/20/2010 - 10:13 pm

Beards

by Michael Wolraich 9/20/2010 - 11:58 pm (re: artappraiser)

Peace train's a holy roller, everyone jump on the peace train...

by Articleman 9/21/2010 - 12:16 am (re: artappraiser)

you know article man, i think i recall that that cat stevens was a sharia kind of guy. i think that peace train stuff was code for telling the bad guys they wished to get a piece of us. He became a Muslim Mohammedist just for that purpose.

Oh sure, he would wear them Shriner's hats and such but....I knew the truth of that all at the time.

And cat, I mean he chose cat cause he was a secret gay Mohammedist.  I learned all about this from lyndon larouche and this other Indian guy....

 

IF YOU THINK YOU CAN FOOL ME, YOU GOTTA ANOTHER THING COMIN!!! HA

 

 

by Richard Day 9/21/2010 - 2:05 am (re: Articleman)

I am a "cultural relativist", because I have lived the greater part of my life in countries not my own and I have learned well the basic lesson that different cultures, histories and traditions go about solving life's problems in different ways. I wish I knew the Latin for "different strokes for different folks", because it should be written in stone, on some noble building.

If Americans make the same mistake as the Soviets in thinking that "one size fits all"... The USA will end up sharing the fate of the USSR... or worse. We have to get out of people's faces.

by David Seaton 9/21/2010 - 3:15 am

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