Sharia Compliant Part Four - I am a Jew, I am a Christian

Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl

The purpose of listing excerpts from the writings of Imam Rauf has been two fold: 1) Demonstrate what he meant by Sharia Compliant. 2) Demonstrate that there is no universal sharia law.

January 23, 2002 Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately decapitated by Pakistani members of Al Qaeda.  His death was ultimately confirmed, the following February.  Before his beheading, he confessed to his captors of the preposterous crimes of being a Jew and an American. [1] February 23, 2003, a Memorial Service was held at B'nai Jeshurun, a prominent synagogue in Manhattan, and in the audience was Judea Pearl, Daniel Pearl's father. [2]  Imam Rauf was invited to speak at this memorial.  In this context of an American Jew who was murdered for being an American Jew, Rauf uttered these words,

If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. [Judea] Pearl.

This Muslim imam stood before a Jewish congregation in a synagogue and claimed to be a Jew.  Jeffrey Goldberg notes that the Islamists that murdered Pearl despise Christians, Jews, and apostates.  A sample of the speech is below.[3]  I recommend clicking the link to read the rest.

We are people of faith and perhaps people without any professed religion: practicing and perhaps not. Today we are members of many faiths: Christian, Jew and Muslim. But we have come together to confirm the common ground of our faiths, on which we all stand united, to assert our common values, values that constrain us to act in the highest sense of what it means to be human. 

 We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths. If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl. 

If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one Mr. Pearl. 

 And I am here to inform you, with the full authority of the Quranic texts and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, that to say La ilaha illallah Muhammadun rasulullah is no different. It expresses the same theological and ethical principles and values.

We are here especially to seek your forgiveness and of your family for what has been done in the name of Islam.[4]

Sharia Compliant - Part Three

[Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wrote "What Shariah Law Is All About" for the Huffington Post, April 24, 2009.  Below is the article in its complete form.  The bold and italics are mine.]

We hear a lot about "firebrand" Muslim clerics calling for the installation of Shariah law. It conjures images of women being stoned and forced into hiding behind burkas and denied educations. We think of beheadings and amputations as a form of justice. And we cringe.

But it is important that we understand what is meant by Shariah law. Islamic law is about God's law, and it is not that far from what we read in the Declaration of Independence about "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." The Declaration says "men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

At the core of Shariah law are God's commandments, revealed in the Old Testament and revised in the New Testament and the Quran. The principles behind American secular law are similar to Shariah law - that we protect life, liberty and property, that we provide for the common welfare, that we maintain a certain amount of modesty. What Muslims want is to ensure that their secular laws are not in conflict with the Quran or the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad.

Where there is a conflict, it is not with Shariah law itself but more often with the way the penal code is sometimes applied. Some aspects of this penal code and its laws pertaining to women flow out of the cultural context. The religious imperative is about justice and fairness. If you strive for justice and fairness in the penal code, then you are in keeping with moral imperative of the Shariah.

In America, we have a Constitution that created a three-branch form of government - legislative, executive and judiciary. The role of the judiciary is to ensure that the other two branches comply with the Constitution. What Muslims want is a judiciary that ensures that the laws are not in conflict with the Quran and the Hadith. Just as the Constitution has gone through interpretations, so does Shariah law.

The two pieces of unfinished business in Muslim countries are to revise the penal code so that it is responsive to modern realities and to ensure that the balance between the three branches of government is not out of kilter.

Rather than fear Shariah law, we should understand what it actually is. Then we can encourage Muslim countries to make the changes that achieve the essence of fairness and justice that are at the root of Islam.

Sharia Compliant - Part Two

[This is another section from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's 2004 What's right with Islam: a new vision for Muslims and the West]

AMERICA: A SHARIAH-COMPLIANT STATE

Many American Muslims regard America as a better "Muslim" country than their native homelands.This may sound surprising if not absurd to many Americans, and Muslims outside America, but it is founded on the argument that the American Constitution and system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law.

Muslim legal scholars have defined five areas of life that Islamic law must protect and further. These are life, mind (that is, mental well-being or sanity), religion, property (or wealth), and family (or lineage and progeny). Any system of rule that upholds, protects, and furthers these rights is therefore legally "Islamic," or Shariah compliant, in its substance. Because these rights are God-given, they are inalienable and cannot be deprived of any man or woman without depriving them of their essential humanity.

What I am demonstrating is that the American political structure is Shariah compliant, for "a state inhabited predominantly by Muslims neither defines nor makes it synonymous with an Islamic state. It can become truly Islamic only by virtue of a conscious application of the sociopolitical tenets of Islam to the life of the nation, and by an incorporation of those tenets in the basic constitution of the country." By the same token, a state that does incorporate such sociopolitical tenets has become de facto an Islamic state even if there are no Muslims in name living there, for it expresses the ideals of the good society according to Islamic principles. For America to score even higher on the "Islamic" or "Shariah Compliance" scale, America would need to do two things: invite the voices of all religions to join the dialogue in shaping the nation's practical life, and allow religious communities more leeway to judge among themselves according to their own laws.

The Declaration holds certain truths as self-evident, which links with the Quranic notion of natural religion (din al-fitrah), beliefs embedded in the human heart. Because the Quran asserts that humanity was created from one man and one woman, we are therefore of one family and equal in the eyes of God, differentiated only by our piety and ethical nature. The founders initially enumerated the inalienable rights as life, liberty, and property, replacing the word property with the phrase the pursuit of happiness. Comparing the Declaration's list of rights to the Shariah's list of rights, we find life common to both, while we may say that the Declaration's liberty and pursuit of happiness embrace the Shariah's items mental well-being, family, property, and religion. Aren't our happiness and personal fulfillment found when we are mentally well, enjoying time with our family, tending to our homes, serving humanity and freely practicing the religion of our choice?

The founders then turned to government. Governments exist, the Declaration says, to secure these inalienable rights so that citizens may live the lives they choose. The powers that the government may need to achieve this objective must be derived from the consent of the governed if they are to be just. And if "any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." So the Declaration maintains -- all fully consistent with and expressive of Islamic law's requirements. [Pages 86-87]

Sharia Compliant - Part One

[This is a section from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's 2004 What's right with Islam: a new vision for Muslims and the West]

Grounding itself in reason, just as the Quran and the Abrahamic ethic did in asserting the self-evident oneness of God, the Declaration opens with the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." The language evokes the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a higher law of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which human laws may be -- and ought to be -- measured. It is not political will but moral reasoning accessible to all that is the foundation of the American political system.

But "nature," at least in the eyes of believers in God, is just another word for "God's creation," and thus natural law must mean "the laws that God established and structured creation on." These span the spectrum from the laws of the physical sciences such as mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry to the sociological and psychological laws that govern human relationships, all of which are knowable to humans through reason. Thus the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence opens with the words "When ... it becomes necessary for one People ... to assume ... the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them".

To Muslims, the law decreed by God is called the Shariah, and therefore the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" are by definition Shariah law. It is a law that has to appeal to human reason and be in accord with human nature, informing us that "a community based on ideas held in common is a far more advanced manifestation of human life than a community resulting from race or language or geographical location."

In 1775, a year before the American Revolution began, Alexander Hamilton wrote, "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, but the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." Almost fifty years later, in 1824, Thomas Jefferson noted in reminiscing about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, "We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature and found them engraved on our hearts." Could the Abrahamic ethic as natural religion -- Muslims' din al-fitrah as the core definition of Islam -- be any more lucidly and evidently expressed?

What's right about America is its Declaration of Independence, for it embodies and restates the core values of the Abrahamic, and thus also the Islamic, ethic. Since human liberty is one of its aims, and reason the method by which we justify our political order, then the cardinal moral truths from the Declaration of Independence that flesh out the Abrahamic ethic are:

That all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – that to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

As defined by our rights, we are equal; no one human being has rights superior to those of another human. We are born with these rights; we do not get them from anyone or any government. Indeed, the opposite is the case: whatever rights government has come from us, the governed by our consent. And our right to the pursuit of happiness implies that each one of us has the right to live our lives as we wish – to pursue happiness as we think best – provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same and do not infringe on their rights in this regard. America’s founders thus out lined the moral foundation of a free society – and in the process, and Abrahamic society. These beliefs are fundamental to all Americans and may be said to constitute the American “religion” or creed that all Americans subscribe to and believe in. They are also beliefs fundamental to all Muslims, who regard these beliefs as essential to Islam. [From pages 82-83]