What does a thousand-year-old body of Muslim religious law have to do with the United States?
Absolutely nothing.
But a year ago, 22 states were considering bills that would ban Islamic law, called Sharia in Arabic.
Several states have already passed such legislation, including Louisiana and Mississippi.
The law in Mississippi specifically called out Sharia by name and labelled it as a “guide to the Islamic faith.”
It’s not an issue anymore, however.
The entire issue of creeping Sharia has basically evaporated like hot air from Sean Hannity’s mouth, and one of the last active anti-Shariah bills in the country was withdrawn last week by a New Jersey state legislator.
What is Sharia law? It’s essentially the Islamic legal code. It was developed by Muslim scholars, known as Ullema, centuries ago for the governance of the now defunct Muslim Empire, or Caliphate.
Why do we need to be banning it here, hundreds of years later, on a continent that has almost no history or cultural ties with Islam?
The entire anti-Sharia campaign was born out of the conservative myth that radical “Islamofascists” were planning a secret takeover of the United States.
Once us Muslims had snuck into the corridors of power, we would then begin introducing laws that would substitute the U.S. Constitution with Sharia, essentially reviving the Caliphate here in America and putting us one step closer to global domination.
Think “Red Dawn,” but with parachuting jihadis.
(Wolverines!)
This thought process was promulgated chiefly by the sort of folks who believe that President Barack Obama was born in Africa and is a closet Islamist – or a lizard person from space, same basic group of people.
Think I’m making all this up? In January, Newt Gingrich told a crowd of supporters in South Carolina that “stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools” as a way to “replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.”
So the only logical conclusion was to preemptively nip creeping Sharia in the bud by banning it in state legislatures – because our government doesn’t have better things to do than ban ancient tomes of Middle-Eastern jurisprudence.
That being said, Sharia is important to Muslims in the same sense that the book of Leviticus is important to Jews and papal missives are important to Catholics.
Muslim Americans, who make up less than 1 percent of the American population, might use the Sharia in their personal lives when dealing with family issues such as inheritance or divorce, but that varies widely amongst communities and individuals.
American Muslims might consult the Sharia when deciding on business contracts or the proper way to take out a loan, but there is not, nor has there ever been, any desire to impose our particular set of traditions on the other 99 percent of the country.
That’s why this entire issue is ridiculous, offensive and overall quite stupid.
Needless to say, I’m relieved to see most states dropping the issue.
But this entire episode does raise greater concerns.
For instance, about the same time all this anti-Sharia fervor was reaching its climax, the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, appointed a Muslim American to the state’s Supreme Court.
Christie had to go on television shortly after appointing Justice Sohail Mohammad to defend his decision,
“The guy [Mohammad] is an American citizen. … [This] Sharia Law business is just crap … and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
At its heart, the anti-Sharia movement is xenophobic. It’s reactionary and racist and has very little to do with any intellectual opposition to a set of ideas.
This sort of attitude threatens to hamstring Muslim Americans or any Americans who follow any sort of creed that’s in the minority.
Furthermore, we don’t need any anti-Sharia laws because we already have one – the First Amendment.
By that very token, just as the government cannot be a respecter of any one faith, Islam or other, it cannot act antagonistically towards any one faith.
That is the broader implication of what these yahoos are calling for: the selective application of amendments. When you start selectively applying amendments, why even have them at all?
Nicholas Pierce is a 22-year- old history junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_nabdulpierc.
 
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Contact Nicholas Pierce at [email protected]