This spring, Indiana’s Republican Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith called Islam “a demonic death cult” and said Americans needed “permission to hate again.” The phrasing, at least as excerpted, was unfortunate, and the backlash has been as expected. Several Muslim advocacy groups have called Beckwith’s comments “dangerous” and “hateful.”
But it is worth asking what he was reaching for, because the impulse beneath the words is not imaginary or shameful. Americans sense, correctly, that some systems in the world aspire to unmake the freedoms that protect them and their children, and that a free people is entitled to say so plainly and to resist.
Can a legal system that claims final authority over conscience, speech, and the courtroom be welcomed into a constitutional republic and trusted to remain in submission to the laws of the land? The question deserves more than a sound bite — and this week it received a serious attempt at an answer.
Writing in part in response to A. S. Ibrahim’s new book Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom, Mustafa Akyol — a Cato Institute senior fellow, former New York Times columnist, and perhaps the most articulate Muslim advocate of reconciling Islam with Western liberty — argued that it can. He argues that sharia, rightly understood, need be no more than a voluntary devotion, a way of living toward God that does no harm to any unwilling neighbor.
It is a gracious vision. It is also a familiar one. The same hope reaches us from academic panels, interfaith gatherings, and editorial pages — wherever thoughtful people wish that sharia could be received as a private faith rather than a public law binding even upon bystanders. The difficulty is that what Akyol wishes sharia to be is not what it is.
The ambiguity is not academic. At an open house at a Plano, Texas mosque this July, an outreach director reassured visitors: “Sharia is already here” — by which he meant feeding neighbors, caring for parents, giving to the poor. On that definition, sharia is simply devout private life, and no one need fear it.
Outside the same event stood an Iranian-born Christian who had lived under the other sharia. He did not hate Muslims, he said. He wanted Americans to understand that Islam “becomes offensive the minute it takes power” — when the blasphemy and apostasy laws begin. One word, two meanings. The whole question is which one governs when the choice is no longer voluntary.
Sharia is the meticulous legal implementation of Muhammad’s teaching, example, and indeed his explicit plan for the ordering of society. All of society, composed of those who believe his message and those who do not.
There can be nothing voluntary about certain aspects of adherence to sharia. Yes, one can choose whether to enter Islam (although the sole alternative is sometimes death), but once in Islam, one may never leave, on penalty of death. One may proclaim aloud that Jesus is not God (can you imagine a greater insult?), but one may not state publicly that Muhammad was a false prophet — again, on penalty of death.
A non-Muslim may dislike being barred from holding authority over a Muslim, or from ever testifying against a Muslim in a criminal case, but that is the way sharia demands. Someone may wish his daughters to inherit equally with his sons, but sharia will not hear of it.
None of this is a hostile outsider’s caricature. The apostasy penalty rests on Muhammad’s own reported command: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him” (Sahih al-Bukhari), and it is not a dead letter. Roughly a dozen governments still prescribe death for leaving Islam, and Pew’s survey of tens of thousands of Muslims found that among those who want sharia as the official law, majorities endorsed executing apostates — 86 percent in Egypt, 82 percent in Jordan. Where sharia is most fully embraced, so are its penalties. The pattern is not incidental to Islam. It derives from it.
The reply will come: these punishments are not always carried out. That is often true, and it is beside the point. A law that prescribes death for leaving a religion is not made less menacing by an executioner who is usually occupied elsewhere. The rule stands on the books, waiting, and enforcement follows conditions, not conscience — Iran applied these penalties sparingly under the Shah and comprehensively after 1979, though the law itself had not changed.
But set the death penalties aside, since they are the easiest cases to wave away. The quieter disabilities remain in force even where the harsh ones are dormant: the man whose testimony against his neighbor is barred, although his neighbor’s against him is not, the citizen who may not be promoted over a colleague, the daughter who inherits half her brother’s share. Those who assure us these are minor matters are rarely the ones harmed by them.
Akyol offers a related reassurance: the penal code is only a small part of sharia. This is true and unpersuasive in the same breath. A small quantity of poison in a glass of water is a poor reason to drink it.
The provisions that end or harm a life may occupy relatively few pages in the fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) manuals, but these rules run the whole length of a life lived under them—governing what one may say, whom one may marry, what one may inherit, and whether one’s testimony counts at all—and the whole breadth of the territory those manuals govern. That they are few in proportion does not diminish their reach. Page count is not jurisdiction.
Akyol points out that even Israel and Greece accommodate sharia courts. But his own examples illustrate the opposite point more clearly than he perhaps intends.
In Greece, Muslim women gained the right to opt out of sharia inheritance rules only after the European Court of Human Rights intervened on behalf of a widow shortchanged under sharia relative to Greek civil law. The reform came not from within the tradition but from an external court with superior political authority. In Israel, by contrast, no such external intervention has occurred, and so Muslim citizens who would prefer civil inheritance law over sharia’s rules have no exit.
Akyol presents these as examples of sharia’s compatibility with liberal democracy. They actually demonstrate something more sobering: sharia conforms to liberal norms when and only when a superior external power requires it to. When that external pressure is absent, it reverts to the shape in which Muhammad left it.
The vision of reform is admirable. But the pathway from the classical position to a tame sharia requires more than the mere fact that many Muslims happen to prefer non-enforcement in a given time and place. It requires the tradition itself to declare Muhammad’s explicit commands and demonstrated example misunderstood, historically limited, or permanently superseded—a theological transformation of the first order, and one that has not happened.
The obstacle to it happening is the foundational claim of Islam that Muhammad was the final prophet, that his words and example are binding precedent, and that the classical scholars who derived these rulings were doing exactly what the tradition requires. Until someone inside the tradition with genuine scholarly authority explains how Muhammad’s commands on apostasy and blasphemy are permanently inapplicable—without abandoning the prophethood that makes his words authoritative—the constitutional conflict Ibrahim documents remains as he describes it.
Someone may note that American society has done well with a citizenry that largely holds the Bible — which also prescribes stoning — to be true. But they would not be comparing apples to apples. The church long ago read the Mosaic penal law as fulfilled and repudiated its coercive past on its own scriptural authority. That is the very move sharia cannot make, resting as it does on the example of the prophet the tradition holds final.
There is a further question that must be faced soberly. The strategy underlying this whole approach is to welcome sharia in, assign it a bounded domain, and trust that it will stay there. This invites the question: what makes you confident that you, or your heirs, will always be able to keep it in that box?
A tradition that has not theologically repudiated its own political and penal claims does not become domesticated simply because liberal democratic institutions currently contain it. It remains what it is, waiting for conditions that let it be what it insists it must be.
Readers should understand that, while liberal Islam does exist, no one has yet persuaded the gatekeepers of sharia, those Islamic scholars who hold Muhammad’s words and example to be binding, to enlist those words in the service of the tame vision of sharia that Akyol recommends. We may dream of the day that they do, for it would bring a notable reduction in violence and injustice the world over.
Until then, we must occupy the world as it is. A world in which sharia as a system of law remains an irreconcilable enemy of freedom. Those who treat Akyol’s sharia as if it had already arrived will find themselves undefended against the one that actually governs.
