The poor little Dr. Williams on the cumbersome camel of the Islamic sharia… !
By Humanist International
A response to an article by Noah Feldman in the International Herald Tribune, Sunday, March 16, 2008
Last month, Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a confused and unscholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow Islamic sharia kangaroo-courts to decide certain matters of family law within the UK jurisdiction, (Sharia lecture:<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7232661.stm>).
Britain has a practical constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop wrongly noted that "the law of the Church of England is the law of the land"-it is not; indeed, it is the common law which is the law of land in UK. The medieval ecclesiastical courts that once worked for the infamous Christian Inquisition and decided cases of witchcraft accusation and punished thousands of unfortunate British women with torture and burning on the stakes, and punished the British intellectuals as heretics with torture, dismemberment and death are all but gone; they handled some cases of marriage and divorce as well in the medieval times. But today in the British legal system, nobody takes these medieval and repressive religious courts seriously; today their self-acclaimed duty is limited to merely repressing the priests, and deciding matters of church property and doctrine.The Archbishop's stupid suggestion was that subject to the agreement (practically emotional and spiritual exploitation on the name of religion) of all parties with the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women (which do not exist at all in the so-called Islamic sharia), it might be an efficient idea to spiritually control the British Muslims by imposing on them the medieval Islamic sharia kangaroo-courts, exploiting their religious sentiments particularly on matters of marriage and divorce.
After the Archbishop's arch-stupidity, all hell broke loose to counter the obvious and utter nonsense. From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world's second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign for his stupidity and utter ignorance. Dr. Williams, a Roman Catholic (an Anglo-catholic = a Roman catholic living in England), allegedly of Italian blood and a Welsh birth, has spent the last couple of years trying to destroy the global Anglican Communion from inside, particularly in the face of continuing controversies about his putting restrictions on the traditional English liberties of joining fraternal organisations; by his mischievous and immoral ordaining of gay priests and recognising same-sex marriages, of course, in this way virtually ordinating himself as an « Arch-gay-bishop ».
Dr. Williams' unfair and undeserved rise to the theological throne clearly points towards the presence of Vatican
John Shelby Spong once accused Williams of being a 'neo-medievalist', preaching orthodoxy to the people in the pew but knowing in private that it just isn't true).
[Homosexuality and Dr. Rowan Williams
Williams' contribution to Anglican views of homosexuality was perceived as quite irresponsible and absurd, read, liberal even before he was enthroned as Archbishop. These views are evident in a paper written by Williams called 'The Body's Grace', which he originally delivered as the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address in 1989 to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, and which is now part of a series of essays collected in the book "Theology and Sexuality" (ed. Eugene Rogers, Blackwells 2002). In the conclusion of this address, he asserted:
"In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures."
The same year as he made the above comments, and as a practical consequence of the views he expressed, Williams founded the 'Institute for the Study of Christianity and Sexuality' (which in 1996 became the 'Centre for the Study of Christianity and Sexuality') – a group meant to combat homophobia (in fact, for promoting and supporting homosexuality-and implicitly paedophilia-in priests and general public). He was then Professor of Divinity at Oxford University
When he became Archbishop, questions of whether and how Williams would apply his absurd views as Archbishop, specifically with regard to homosexual relationships among the clergy, were put squarely in the spotlight, through the issue of the proposed consecration of gay priest Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading. Following protest from a number of bishops from various parts of the Anglican Communion, Williams asked John to withdraw his candidacy, but then arranged his appointment as Dean of St Albans, one of the oldest Christian sites in England, in a move that was widely seen as a compromise to appease, for the time-being, the supporters of the unity of the Anglican Communion.
In an August 19, 2006 interview with a Dutch newspaper, Nederlands Dagblad, Williams stated that "in terms of decision-making the American Church has pushed the boundaries" in its policies regarding homosexuality. Williams argued that the Church had to be "welcoming", rather than "inclusive", a distinction he characterised by saying: "I don't believe inclusion is a value in itself. Welcome is. We don't say 'Come in and we ask no questions'. I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviours, ideas, emotions. The boundaries are determined by what it means to be loyal to Jesus Christ." Moreover, the Archbishop appeared to distance himself from his more irresponsible 1989 essay, explaining, "That was when I was a professor, to stimulate debate... It did not generate much support and a lot of criticism – quite fairly on a number of points." However, in a later interview with Time magazine in June 2007, he stated that he had not changed his own mind, although he is now constrained from expressing personal views at variance with the corporate view of the Church. In answer to the question:
"You yourself once thought it possible that same-sex relationships might be legitimate in God's eyes" he responded: "Yes, I argued that in 1987. I still think that the points I made there and the questions I raised were worth making as part of the ongoing discussion. I'm not recanting. But those were ideas put forward as part of a theological discussion. I'm now in a position where I'm bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change."
On January 24, 2007, it was revealed that Williams and John Sentamu had written to Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, on behalf of the Church of England, united in support of the Church's bid to be exempt from laws on adoption by gay couples. In a letter they wrote, "rights of conscience (?, since when homosexuality became a matter of conscience…!) cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning".
In contrast to his diminished outspokenness on the acceptability of homosexual relationships as a matter of theology, however, he has continued to affirm the civil and human rights of homosexuals (excluding any campaign for the civil and human rights of ordinary people-women, children and minorities, of course,...!). For example, in his Advent Letter for 2007 he said: "...it is part of our Christian and Anglican discipleship to condemn homophobic prejudice and violence, to defend the human rights and civil liberties of homosexual people and to offer them the same pastoral care and loving service that we owe to all in Christ's name (The Bible never allowed such absurd and morally corrupt views….!)". In "The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today", an address to the Anglican Communion in June 2006, he said: "It is possible – indeed, it is imperative – to give the strongest support to the defence of homosexual people against violence, bigotry and legal disadvantage, to appreciate the role played in the life of the church by people of homosexual orientation, and still to believe that this doesn't settle the question of whether the Christian Church has the freedom, on the basis of the Bible, and its historic teachings, to bless homosexual partnerships as a clear expression of God's will….?) ."
The arch-gay-bishop, the little Dr. Williams, with his unkempt hair and messed up beard, visibly looking nervous and upset to the level of mental unstability, is also known to have supported the Saudi-backed Al-Quaida 9/11 terrorists-attackers on twin towers in USA, giving them spiritual moral support.
(He was in New York at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks as if out of prior knowledge, only yards from Ground Zero, watching and delivering a lecture; he subsequently wrote a short book, 'Writing in the Dust', offering reflections on the event. In reference to Al Qaeda, he claimed that terrorists can have serious moral goals – "Terrorists can have serious moral goals", says Williams, telegraph.co.uk 2003-10-14 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/15/wbish15.xml>;
"Tales of Canterbury
(Earlier he got into trouble with the press for allegedly supporting a 'pagan organisation', the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards, which promotes Welsh language and literature and uses druidic ceremonial but is actually not religious in nature.<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2172918.stm>).
Those contentious battles subjected him to similar kind of outcry that his reference to medieval Islamic-sharia kangaroo-courts has unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams' mention of Orthodox Jewish law as Jews are a racial group and not just a religious invention like Muslims. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word "sharia" that was justifiably radioactive.
In some sense, the outrage against according a degree of official status to repressive and medieval shariah in a modern European country should not come as a surprise. No legal system has ever had proved to be worse than this medieval sharia. To many, the word "sharia" justifiably conjures horrors of hands and feet cut off, flogging on minimal offence, women and men stoned on suspicion of adultery, Female genital Mutilation, Forced Marriage, forced nuns-like dress and oppression of women in every field of life.
In the same way, many will remember that the British Christian law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more ! How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most Western Christian countries authorized torture as an official component of the Christian criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the British Christian law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands.
However, in Britain as in other European countries, the civilized governments have evolved out of the torturous and medieval Christian laws. But, even replacing such medieval Christian repressive laws with Islamic repressive and medieval shariah, as is being done in may Arab Islamic spiritual colonies like Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria and Iran etc., have only resulted in the women, married or unmarried, being stripped of the rights that modern civilized European law had granted them during the age of colonisation. Introducing medieval sexist and repressive Islamic sharia would be hardly progress toward equality or the betterment of the condition of women !
In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most repressive and inhuman legal regulations ever applied anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh and brutal punishments prescribed by the Islamic sharia for a number of offences, we also have in view the low standards of proof employed for the implementation of these sharia brutalities. As a matter of legal fiction, before an adultery conviction can be obtained, the victim is asked to to produce four adult male witnesses who must testify that they directly observed the actual penetration during the sexual act, otherwise the victim woman is arrested for her confession and is punished in public, with stoning if married or 100 flogging, if unmarried. Of course, it is true that Islamic sharia is the only system of law that punishes the victims. The extremes of the brutal Islamic sharia system like capital punishment for relatively minor drug crimes, apostasy or blasphemy, as practised in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc. cannot be ignored. It sometimes seems as if even brute animals don't need the brutality and injustice of the so-called Islamic sharia. The Westerners have long suffered through the shariah-like Christian punishments which should serve as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible.
In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of shariah has always been bad, and even when Saudi-bedouin's petrodollars have been buying the politicians and policy-makers in their Islamic spiritual colonies; the forward-looking Muslims continue to think of shariah as outdated, irreformable and really in need of abandonment.
In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most repressive and inhuman legal regulations ever applied anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh and brutal punishments prescribed by the Islamic sharia for a number of offences, we also have in view the low standards of proof employed for the implementation of these sharia brutalities. As a matter of legal fiction, before an adultery conviction can be obtained, the victim is asked to to produce four adult male witnesses who must testify that they directly observed the actual penetration during the sexual act, otherwise the victim woman is arrested for her confession and is punished in public, with stoning if married or 100 flogging, if unmarried. Of course, it is true that Islamic sharia is the only system of law that punishes the victims. The extremes of the brutal Islamic sharia system like capital punishment for relatively minor drug crimes, apostasy or blasphemy, as practised in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc. cannot be ignored. It sometimes seems as if even brute animals don't need the brutality and injustice of the so-called Islamic sharia. The Westerners have long suffered through the shariah-like Christian punishments which should serve as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible.
In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of shariah has always been bad, and even when Saudi-bedouin's petrodollars have been buying the politicians and policy-makers in their Islamic spiritual colonies; the forward-looking Muslims continue to think of shariah as outdated, irreformable and really in need of abandonment.
Today, 65 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 55 percent of Jordanians say that shariah should not be used as a source of legislation in their countries, the minority who favours sharia have no idea of what this medieval and repressive consists of. The progressive political parties in all Islamic countries do not even mention the adoption of the repressive medieval custom of brutal punishments.
Indeed, the sharia has always been looked with dislike and horror. And the message resonates. Wherever fundamentalists and extremist Islamists have been allowed to run for office, they have tended to win by crudely exploiting the popular religious feelings and then abusing their political power for imposing a Nazi-style Islamic fascism on the name of the Islamic sharia. The fascist Islamist movement in its various incarnations, from moderates to radicals, receive the petrodollars from the imperial-minded Saudi and Gulf Boudins who donate generously, of course, in their imperial quest for overseas influence and political power, yet the slogans of Arabian shariah are not very popular, for it echoes of brutality, repression and torture.
How is it that what so many Westerners see as the most unappealing and medieval aspect of Islam is, to fundamentalist Muslims, the essential core of a global movement of Islamic conquest of the world? The explanation surely must go beyond the oversimplified assumption that Muslims want to use shariah to control their women especially since large numbers of women oppose the Islamists in general and the very idea of the repressive shariah in particular, (In Canada, the first group to oppose the announcement of the possible legal status to the so-called Islamic sharia courts were the Islamic women!).
Is sharia the Rule of Law?
One reason for the divergence between Western and Muslim views of shariah is that they are not all using the word to mean the same thing. Sharia, properly understood, is not a set of legal rules revealed by the Arabia Allah of Muslims. To believing Muslims, it is something deeper and malignant, infused with immoral and repressive purposes of the imperial-minded Bedouin barbarians. At its core, shariah represents the idea that all human beings and all human governments should be subject to medieval Bedouin tribal customs, since they, the Bedouins, believe that all lands belong to their ancestor deity Allah, therefore they have a birth right, spiritually and physically, to control and dominate the whole world.
The word "sharia" connotes a connection to the ignorant and murderous desert nomads and their set of unchanging medieval desert–oriented beliefs and customs that orders the desert-Bedouin's lives in accordance with their repressive tribal code. Westerners justifiably imagine that the medieval shariah advocates simply want to use the medieval Koran for their repressive medieval punishments. But the reality is much more complicated and much more horrible. Koran doesn't mention the word « sharia » to mean any legal code at all. This word or the concept was neither used by the Islamic prophet nor by his companions nor yet by the earlier Muslims. The Islamist politicians are also very vague and ignorant about the definition of this thing called sharia which medieval minded religious fundamentalists want to be the source for the law of their socially backward countries. And with no good reason, because just adopting such medieval tribal would create a repressive confusion as nobody knows how a legal system would actually operate under such absurdity.
All Muslims would agree, for example, that Koran prohibits lending money as usury though not investments in which risks and profits are shared; and the ban on Muslims drinking alcohol is an example for the simpleton. However, some rules associated with the confused concept of shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned, retrogressive and harsh. Men and women are treated as unequal, women being inferior and the property of men, thus for example; making it hard for women to live as equal in a marriage and if necessary, to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. It prescribes unequal treatment for rich and poor. It encourages the vigilante-style honor killings that still occur inmost of the Middle Eastern, Asian Islamic countries and among Muslim communities living in the West. And it allows women's property being taken or used by their guardian men. As in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where wearing a head scarf and nun-like habits are legally mandated and enforced through special brutal religious police, so in most other Muslim countries fundamentalist view is that the head scarf and nuns-like dress is one way of implementing the religious duty to dress what they call modesty, a desirable social norm, as well as socially and legally enforceable rule.
One reason for the divergence between Western and Muslim views of shariah is that they are not all using the word to mean the same thing. Sharia, properly understood, is not a set of legal rules revealed by the Arabia Allah of Muslims. To believing Muslims, it is something deeper and malignant, infused with immoral and repressive purposes of the imperial-minded Bedouin barbarians. At its core, shariah represents the idea that all human beings and all human governments should be subject to medieval Bedouin tribal customs, since they, the Bedouins, believe that all lands belong to their ancestor deity Allah, therefore they have a birth right, spiritually and physically, to control and dominate the whole world.
The word "sharia" connotes a connection to the ignorant and murderous desert nomads and their set of unchanging medieval desert–oriented beliefs and customs that orders the desert-Bedouin's lives in accordance with their repressive tribal code. Westerners justifiably imagine that the medieval shariah advocates simply want to use the medieval Koran for their repressive medieval punishments. But the reality is much more complicated and much more horrible. Koran doesn't mention the word « sharia » to mean any legal code at all. This word or the concept was neither used by the Islamic prophet nor by his companions nor yet by the earlier Muslims. The Islamist politicians are also very vague and ignorant about the definition of this thing called sharia which medieval minded religious fundamentalists want to be the source for the law of their socially backward countries. And with no good reason, because just adopting such medieval tribal would create a repressive confusion as nobody knows how a legal system would actually operate under such absurdity.
All Muslims would agree, for example, that Koran prohibits lending money as usury though not investments in which risks and profits are shared; and the ban on Muslims drinking alcohol is an example for the simpleton. However, some rules associated with the confused concept of shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned, retrogressive and harsh. Men and women are treated as unequal, women being inferior and the property of men, thus for example; making it hard for women to live as equal in a marriage and if necessary, to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. It prescribes unequal treatment for rich and poor. It encourages the vigilante-style honor killings that still occur inmost of the Middle Eastern, Asian Islamic countries and among Muslim communities living in the West. And it allows women's property being taken or used by their guardian men. As in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where wearing a head scarf and nun-like habits are legally mandated and enforced through special brutal religious police, so in most other Muslim countries fundamentalist view is that the head scarf and nuns-like dress is one way of implementing the religious duty to dress what they call modesty, a desirable social norm, as well as socially and legally enforceable rule.
It is also well known that the mandating of capital punishment for apostasy is on the agenda of most elected fundamentalists Islamists. For many liberal Muslims today, living in corrupt Islam-sanctioned autocracies, the call for sharia is not only a call for sexism, obscurantism and savage punishments but also for an Islamic version of horrible Christian Inquisition – spectre of a theocratic fascism, indeed.
The Sway of the Mullah
To understand deep resentment against shariah, we need to ask a crucial question that is rarely addressed in the West. Is there any system of Islamic law? In his lifetime, the Prophet Muhammad was both the religious and the tribal leader of the community of Muslim believers. His supposed revelation, the Koran, contained some conflicting ordinances and quasi-laws, pertaining especially to ritual matters, some medieval codes of morality and tribal way of inheritance; but there was no Islamic state there and Koran was not primarily a legal book and nor did it include any legal code of the kind that can be found in parts of the Hebrew Bible. Koran only claims to be a general guide book for the ancient and medieval Arab tribal Bedouins. When the first generation of Muslim Bedouins needed guidance on a subject that was not addressed by revelation, they either followed their tribal tradition or went directly to Muhammad. He either answered of his own accord or, if he was unsure, awaited and asked guidance from tribal Muslims round him, and often presented such gossip in the form of a new revelation from his deity Allah.
With the death of Muhammad, the imaginary divine revelation to the Prophet obviously stopped. The role of the tribal/religious leader passed to a series of caliphs (Arabic for "substitute") who stood in the prophet's stead. That left the often uneducated and ignorant caliphs in a tricky position when it came to resolving the emerging legal matters. The caliph possessed Muhammad's authority as well as his medieval and tribal thoughts. It also left the emerging repressive bedouin Islamic empire in need of something of a bind. However the Koran did not speak clearly to any particular question, it was just a hotch-potch of ancient sayings, myths, stories often as distortions from Bible and Torah as well as some medieval tribal inventions on the name of a fictional Allah. How was the law to be determined then?
The answer that developed after the first couple of centuries of Islam was that the Koran could be supplemented by reference to the prophet's sayings and deeds during his life time, an absurd way to control the colonial confusion.
His actions and words had long been forgotten by this time, but were often invented in the form of oral tradition, beginning presumably with a person who heard his great-grand-father saying that he heard somebody else's great-grand-father saying that he in turn had heard somebody's grand-father mentioning that according to his friend's or a relative's grandfather who or whose friend ot relative of a friend have claimed witnessing the action or statement first hand. Accurate reports could not be distinguished from false ones as more than 99% of such oral traditions purportedly stated by very pious Muslims had proved to be contradictory and incredible, and were rejected. But, of course, even a trustworthy report after 250 years on a particular situation could not directly resolve most new legal problems that arose after brutal Islamic colonization of the world around. To address such problems, it was necessary to reason by guess work, abusing the analogy from one situation to another. There was also the possibility that a local and communal consensus existed on what could be done under particular circumstances in different colonies, and that, too, was thought to have created substantial confusion.
This fourfold combination: the insufficient and often vague verses of Koran, the path of the prophet as invented or reported imprecisely in the collections of reports called the Hadiths, confused and out-of-place analogical guessing and so-called consensus under the blood-stained Bedouin swords, in fact, amounted to an unreliable and insufficient basis for any concept of a legal code. It is as well that nobody would be able to say how these four opposite and contradictory factors fit together? Indeed, who had the authority other than the ignorant but blood-stained Bedouin sword, to say that these preliminary factors and not other inventions would become the sources of the colonial laws in Islamic religious colonies ! The first four caliphs, who knew the prophet personally, never tried to make any thing near to a legal code, but after them, the imperial-minded caliphs were faced with the need; and there were a growing group of religious scholars and colonial specialists who asserted that they, collectively, could ascertain the customary law from the available sources, at least, sufficient to give the brutal Bedouin sword an embalm of legality as well as to keep the colonised nations quiet and obedient.
With the death of Muhammad, the imaginary divine revelation to the Prophet obviously stopped. The role of the tribal/religious leader passed to a series of caliphs (Arabic for "substitute") who stood in the prophet's stead. That left the often uneducated and ignorant caliphs in a tricky position when it came to resolving the emerging legal matters. The caliph possessed Muhammad's authority as well as his medieval and tribal thoughts. It also left the emerging repressive bedouin Islamic empire in need of something of a bind. However the Koran did not speak clearly to any particular question, it was just a hotch-potch of ancient sayings, myths, stories often as distortions from Bible and Torah as well as some medieval tribal inventions on the name of a fictional Allah. How was the law to be determined then?
The answer that developed after the first couple of centuries of Islam was that the Koran could be supplemented by reference to the prophet's sayings and deeds during his life time, an absurd way to control the colonial confusion.
His actions and words had long been forgotten by this time, but were often invented in the form of oral tradition, beginning presumably with a person who heard his great-grand-father saying that he heard somebody else's great-grand-father saying that he in turn had heard somebody's grand-father mentioning that according to his friend's or a relative's grandfather who or whose friend ot relative of a friend have claimed witnessing the action or statement first hand. Accurate reports could not be distinguished from false ones as more than 99% of such oral traditions purportedly stated by very pious Muslims had proved to be contradictory and incredible, and were rejected. But, of course, even a trustworthy report after 250 years on a particular situation could not directly resolve most new legal problems that arose after brutal Islamic colonization of the world around. To address such problems, it was necessary to reason by guess work, abusing the analogy from one situation to another. There was also the possibility that a local and communal consensus existed on what could be done under particular circumstances in different colonies, and that, too, was thought to have created substantial confusion.
This fourfold combination: the insufficient and often vague verses of Koran, the path of the prophet as invented or reported imprecisely in the collections of reports called the Hadiths, confused and out-of-place analogical guessing and so-called consensus under the blood-stained Bedouin swords, in fact, amounted to an unreliable and insufficient basis for any concept of a legal code. It is as well that nobody would be able to say how these four opposite and contradictory factors fit together? Indeed, who had the authority other than the ignorant but blood-stained Bedouin sword, to say that these preliminary factors and not other inventions would become the sources of the colonial laws in Islamic religious colonies ! The first four caliphs, who knew the prophet personally, never tried to make any thing near to a legal code, but after them, the imperial-minded caliphs were faced with the need; and there were a growing group of religious scholars and colonial specialists who asserted that they, collectively, could ascertain the customary law from the available sources, at least, sufficient to give the brutal Bedouin sword an embalm of legality as well as to keep the colonised nations quiet and obedient.
This self-appointed group came to be known as the Islamic mullahs and over the course of a few generations, with their « spiritual » favouring of the persons of the caliphs, they got these caliphs to acknowledge them as the guardians of the medieval Islamis law. By their trickery of interpreting a command that originated in Koran for a specic situation and for that particular time and period into something applicable later on in totally different situations, they gained control over the quasi-legal system as it actually existed. In this clever and cunning way, they pronounced themselves, into something like "the spiritual heirs of the prophet of Islam."
Among the generally ignorant and blind followers of Islam, called the Sunnis, this brainwashing and propaganda took effect very early and persisted until modern times. For the Shiites, who believe that the succession of power should have followed the prophet's lineage, the prophet presumably had several biological successors called Imams who supposedly claimed extraordinary divine authority. Once they were gone, however, the Shiite mullahs also came to occupy a role not unlike that of their Sunni counterparts.
Under the customary theory that the so-called Islamic mullahs developed to explain the division of labor in the Islamic state, the caliph had paramount and absolute powers to rule and to fulfil different medieval Koranic divine injunction. But this was not a task he could accomplish on his own. It required him to delegate responsibility to his relatives and favourites as judges, who would apply the Koranic Bedouin customs concocted on the name of the Bedouin ancestor deity called Allah, and they interpreted il as they thought it politically conducive. The caliph could promote or fire them, the powers he used or abused to make sure that his dictates would be transformed into the Islamic laws, and these were these Islamic mulahs who interpreted and justified such dictates on the name of Islam and Allah.
The absolutist caliphs and eventually the aggressive Islamic Turkish kings called sultans who came to rule once the caliphate lost most of its worldly influence, still had plenty of power, according to the Islamic divine right theory. They handled foreign affairs more or less at their discretion. And they could also issue what were effectively administrative regulations provided these repressive and often autocratic regulations were pronounced on the name of the so-called Islamic law. The regulations slowly accumulated and became part of the collection of the Islamic law, custom and tradition called sharia. They also enabled the state to enforce a repressive social conduct without having to put every case before the courts, where convictions would often be impossible to obtain because of the political interference of the Islamic rulers.
The upshot is that the system of Islamic sharia law as it came to called allowed a great deal of repression. That is why today's opponents of sharia are against adoption of any legal code derived from or dictated by sharia as nothing comprehensive has ever existed in Islamic history on the name of sharia. To the progressive Islamist politicians who opposes it or for the civil society that abhor it, sharia generally means mere religiously repressive hotch-potch. Because sharia really means establishing a medieval legal system in which Allah's name is used for authorising and validating everyday laws passed by an Islamic, mediocre, semi-literate and of tern non-democratically elected legislature. In other words, for them, shariah is expected to function as something like the medieval custom and tradition. The Rights of Humans and particularly the Rights of Women being the principle deficiencies. So in contemporary Islamic politics, the call to oppose sharia does primarily mean refusing the veiling of women and the use of barbaric and physically mutilating corporal punishment as ell as opposing other retrogressive customs.
A little-remarked feature of traditional Islamic government: that a state under sharia has not been, for more than a thousand years, subject to any precise version of the rule of law. That is why the traditional Islamic states had been lost in the dictatorships and autocratic religious monarchies that have governed so much of the Muslim world for the last century. Islamic governments were illegitimate in the dual sense, that they generally suppressed the individual and communal legal rights of their subjects and that these governments were the products of brutal Islamic conquests. The individual legal rights as practised in the Islamic countries, lacked the basic guarantees of the life, property and the due legal process as well as the protection from arbitrary government, the oppressions opposed by people all over the world for centuries.
In practise, the evil Islamic mullah's leverage to demand acceptance for their particular interpretation of the Islamic law came from the fact that most of the time the caliphate was essentially hereditary as of right. That afforded the mullahs major influence at the transitional moments when a caliph was being chosen or challenged by another claimant. On taking office, a new ruler, usually one having been designated by his dead predecessor, had to fend off competing claimants. The first thing he needed was affirmation of the legitimacy of his assumption of power. The mullahs were prepared to offer just that, in exchange for the ruler's favours to their person and their influence, in promising to allow their particular interpretation of the Islamic medieval law.
Once in office, rulers faced the inevitable threat of invasion or a palace coup. The caliph would need the mullahs to declare a religious obligation to protect his government in a defensive jihad. Having these mullahs on his pay roll in times of crisis was a tremendous asset for the absolute Islamic ruler who could be saved by mullah's affirmation on the name of the medieval sharia. The mullah's insistence that the ruler give a semblance of obeying sharia was motivated largely by their false belief that it was Allah's will. But in fact, it was mullah's will, a religious rule as they interpreted it. As a confident, self-defined elite that controlled and administered the so-called Islamic law according to their whims and the material benefits the mullahs, recieved, they were too corrupt. Not only this, but that they were agents of ignorance and superstition which are crucial in mentally backward religious societies where physical and spiritual violence ruled. The mullahs and their absolutist medieval sharia were thus the facrors responsible for the social backwardness that Islamic society came to embody right from its inception into our modern day. Without dissidence and opposition to the medieval sharia, there would have been no Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad, no Ibn-i-Rushd (Avoress) in Europe, no prosperity of Muslim Spain, no reign of mullah hater-caliphs like the Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul.
For generations, Western students of the traditional Islamic customary law have righjtly assumed that the Islamic mullahs, like the Christian priests, were theorists of religious absolutism and could not offer any meaningful check on the ruler.
Today's fundamentalist and extremist Muslims are indeed being completely fanciful when they act and speak as though sharia can come anywhere near to be a structure of a modern state subject to the rule of law. One big reason that fundamentalist Islamist political parties do so well running on a extremist platform is that their exploitation of the name of mythical Islamic sharia.
The Shariah Despotism.
But if Shariah is unpopular among so many Muslims, it is in large part because of its historical association with the Islamic repression. Is it doing the same work today? Here there is reason. The problem is that the traditional Islamic custom rested on a bizarre imbalance of powers between an absolute ruler subject to no law and a class of quasi-ignorant mullahs who interpreted and administered the medival sharia under the command of the ruler. The governments of most contemporary majority-Muslim states, indeed, still have these features. Rulers govern as if they were above the law, not subject to it, and the mullahs who once wielded and still weild so much influence are as corrupt, ignorant and dishonest as before and therefore so low in status.
In only two important instances do mullahs today exercise real power, and in both cases we can see a complete deviation from any just role. The first is Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a distinguished mullah, non-democratically assumed executive power and became a fascist and absolute supreme leader after the 1979 brutal theocratic rebellion gainst a legitimate state. The result of this configuration, unique in the history of the Islamic world but indeed an Islamic carbon copy of the Communist revolution in China, is that the quasi-ignorant and absolutist mullah-rulers had no counterbalance and so became as unjust, unruly, oppressive as the fascist Stalin in Communist Russia. The other example is Saudi Arabia, where the ignorant mullahs retain an absolut power. The unfortunate outcome is that they have slowed down many government initiative for reform, of course, with a major repressive influence on the society, they are playing havoc with the human rights and civil liberties of citizens in general and women's rights in particular. They keep themselves between the state and the society in such a way that government remains unresponsive to its citizens complaints. The oil-rich absolutist Islamic state does not need to obtain tax revenues from its citizens to operate and thus has little reason to keep their interests in mind.
How the mullahs keep their so-called status as keepers of the Islamic customs in other countries is a complex story, but it can be summed up in the adage that partial democratic reforms are sometimes worse than none at all. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire responded to military setbacks with an internal reform movement. The most important reform was the attempt to modify the sharia-based fascist and repressive laws. This modernizing process, foreign to the Islamic quasi-legal tradition, sought to abondan the medieval Bedouin Arab sharia and transform the customary Islamic law from a body of repressive doctrines and customs to become a set of Europeanized and secular rules that could be looked up in a book.
Once the law existed in codified form, however, the law itself was able to replace the ignorant mullahs as the source of authority. Codification took away from the ignorant mullahs their so-called claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. To placate the mullahs, the government kept the so-called sharia courts running but restricted them to handling family-law matters. This strategy paralleled the British Christian colonial approach of allowing religious courts to handle matters of personal status. Today, in countries as far apart as Kenya and Pakistan, the fascist sharia courts still administer family law, of course a small subset of their earlier repressive jurisdiction.
Codification signaled the death knell for the mullah class, but it did not destroy the balance of power on its own. Promulgated in 1876, the European style Ottoman constitution created a legislature composed of two lawmaking bodies one elected, one appointed by the caliph-the Islamic emperor. This amounted to the first semi-democratic institution in the Muslim world; had it established itself, it might have popularized the notion that the people, rather than some fictional bedouin Islamic Allah, are the ultimate source of legal authority.
How the mullahs keep their so-called status as keepers of the Islamic customs in other countries is a complex story, but it can be summed up in the adage that partial democratic reforms are sometimes worse than none at all. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire responded to military setbacks with an internal reform movement. The most important reform was the attempt to modify the sharia-based fascist and repressive laws. This modernizing process, foreign to the Islamic quasi-legal tradition, sought to abondan the medieval Bedouin Arab sharia and transform the customary Islamic law from a body of repressive doctrines and customs to become a set of Europeanized and secular rules that could be looked up in a book.
Once the law existed in codified form, however, the law itself was able to replace the ignorant mullahs as the source of authority. Codification took away from the ignorant mullahs their so-called claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. To placate the mullahs, the government kept the so-called sharia courts running but restricted them to handling family-law matters. This strategy paralleled the British Christian colonial approach of allowing religious courts to handle matters of personal status. Today, in countries as far apart as Kenya and Pakistan, the fascist sharia courts still administer family law, of course a small subset of their earlier repressive jurisdiction.
Codification signaled the death knell for the mullah class, but it did not destroy the balance of power on its own. Promulgated in 1876, the European style Ottoman constitution created a legislature composed of two lawmaking bodies one elected, one appointed by the caliph-the Islamic emperor. This amounted to the first semi-democratic institution in the Muslim world; had it established itself, it might have popularized the notion that the people, rather than some fictional bedouin Islamic Allah, are the ultimate source of legal authority.
But that was not to be. Less than a year after the legislature first met, Sultan Abdulhamid II suspended its operation on the insistance of the Islamic mullahs, he suspended the constitution the following year. Yet the caliph did not restore the ignorant mullahs to the position as he was wary of the repressive practices. With legislature out of the way, the caliph could not resist the company of ignorant mullahs, and with their aid, found himself in the position of near-absolute Islamic ruler. This Islamic arrangement set the pattern for government in the Muslim world after the Islamic Ottoman empire fell. Under sharia, the law became a tool of the mullahs, not an authority overthem. What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was nothing but a medieval-style theocratic dictatorship.
Shariah and Democracy
The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they know a little bit of Islam themselves, seem to have little interest in restoring the ignorant mullahs to their old fascist role. The fundamentalist Islamist movement, like communist and fasciet ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform the state and society through the tools of medieval and Islamic brainwashing into an absolute, anti-European and retrogressive fascist government.
The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they know a little bit of Islam themselves, seem to have little interest in restoring the ignorant mullahs to their old fascist role. The fundamentalist Islamist movement, like communist and fasciet ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform the state and society through the tools of medieval and Islamic brainwashing into an absolute, anti-European and retrogressive fascist government.
The mainstream Sunni Islamist position, found, for example, in the pseudo-liberal theocratic platforms of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, is that the semi-elected absolutist mullah legislature should draft and pass laws that are consistent with the medieavl, mediocre and repressive Islamic sharia. Medieval shariah whether democratized or not, remains as fascist as ever; one can compare the absolutist Islamic sharia fasicm in Iran and Saudia: one elected and other non-elected.
In demoratically elected Islamic shariah fascism, in case the assembly gets it a bit non-dogmatic or liberal, then either the Islamic Gueardian Council (as in Iran) would cancell the legislation, or the Islamists would recommend the judicial review of legislative actions in the medieval-style sharia courts to guarantee that they do not violate the basic repressive and retrogressive versions of Islam. In such case nobody would dare to oppose such Islamist move for fear of his life or livelihood. Such ultra-fascist arrangements have made their way into several recent constitutions that seek to reconcile Islam repression wirh democracy. It may be found, for example, in the medieavl and represive Pakistani (Islamic) Constitution of 1973-amended many times till 2008, the Afghan (Islamic) Constitution of 2004 and the Iraqi Constitution of 2005 ; all of these constitutions dispense lower and degrading status of women and minorities. Islamic sharia based judicial review transforms the highest judicial body of the state into a guarantor of repression in conformity with medieval Islamic customs. The higher courts can then use this power to push further for an even more repressive vision of Islamic law, as in Afghanistan, or for a similar version, as in Pakistan.
The modern incarnation of sharia not only invokes the memory of the Islamic repressive imperialism but is backward looking in its methodology. What the anti-West Islamists generally do not disclose, though, is that such institutions on their own will not deliver any rule of law, or the values associated with the so-called sharia.
In demoratically elected Islamic shariah fascism, in case the assembly gets it a bit non-dogmatic or liberal, then either the Islamic Gueardian Council (as in Iran) would cancell the legislation, or the Islamists would recommend the judicial review of legislative actions in the medieval-style sharia courts to guarantee that they do not violate the basic repressive and retrogressive versions of Islam. In such case nobody would dare to oppose such Islamist move for fear of his life or livelihood. Such ultra-fascist arrangements have made their way into several recent constitutions that seek to reconcile Islam repression wirh democracy. It may be found, for example, in the medieavl and represive Pakistani (Islamic) Constitution of 1973-amended many times till 2008, the Afghan (Islamic) Constitution of 2004 and the Iraqi Constitution of 2005 ; all of these constitutions dispense lower and degrading status of women and minorities. Islamic sharia based judicial review transforms the highest judicial body of the state into a guarantor of repression in conformity with medieval Islamic customs. The higher courts can then use this power to push further for an even more repressive vision of Islamic law, as in Afghanistan, or for a similar version, as in Pakistan.
The modern incarnation of sharia not only invokes the memory of the Islamic repressive imperialism but is backward looking in its methodology. What the anti-West Islamists generally do not disclose, though, is that such institutions on their own will not deliver any rule of law, or the values associated with the so-called sharia.
How an executive administration accustomed to constitutional power can be given incentives to subordinate itself to the rule of ignorant mullahs and their medieval and repressive shariah is one of the great mysteries for the pro-religious Western neo-colonial constitutional expert. Total repressive revolution like in Iran has an extremely bad track record in human rights. The communist style Islamic revolution that toppled the legitimate government of the Shah in Iran created an oppressively top-heavy quasi-constitutional structure; however, the equally reactionary dreams the religious wings of the CIA and the British Secret service MI6 entertained for Iraq and Afghanistan, stinks of a pro-West theocratic state or of a disfunctioning Western-style Islamic repressive democracy.
Gradually imposing the repressive Islam therefore increasingly looks like the favourite tactic with the religious wings of the CIA and the Brirish Secret service. Il is also a fact that most of today's political and fundamentalist Islamists, the ones running for office in Morocco or Jordan or Egypt and even Iraq, are such « gradualists » tools of the Western religious interests. They wish to adapt existing political institutions by infusing them with repressive Islamic customs and some modicum of medieval Islamic law, as has been slowly practiced in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Of course, such parties are also superficially and tactically hostile to the United States, at least where USA have worked against their local interests. (Iraq is no exception as many Shiite Islamists there are tactically but stupidly America's close allies.) It is horrible to imagine the electoral success of extremist Islamist parties putting pressure on executives to satisfy the demand of a government embodied in the medieval Islamic sharia.
Something of the sort may slowly be happening in Turkey. The extremist Islamists there seem to be much more liberal than anywhere else in the Muslim world; they do not even advocate using the name of the medieval Islamic sharia (a position that would get their government closed down by the staunchly secular military). Yet their central focus is the rule of law and the expansion of basic religious-oriented rights against the sensible Turkish tradition of state-centered secularism. The courts there are under increasing pressure from zjr extrrmist Muslims to go along with tht horrible nightmarish vision of medieval sharia.
Can the medieval Islamic sharia provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, the so-called sharia aspires to be a medieval law that applies its repression equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled, though worse for the women and the minorities. No one is above it's fascism, and everyone at all times is bound by it's all-encompassing brutality and suppression. But the history of Islamic inperialism also shows that these bizarre ideals of the rule by mrdieval customs have been easily implemented in the Islamic religious colonies, especially through guns, swords and the brutal repression of the sharia fascism. For that, the fascist state were in need Taliban-style religious organization, Nazi-style repression, and effectively repressive mullah institutions, which were reinforced by regular police. It was also seen that recognition of feudals and industrialists within the system was tactful, making them feel that they have more to gain by remaining superficially faithful to its bizarre dictates than by deviating from them like all sane and reasonable persons would do.
In Iran, the Islamists have discredited their faith among many ordinary people through their ceaseless brutality, repression, killings and murders through the Islamic judiciary, and a similar process may be under way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, with all its risks and dangers, the extremist Islamists' aspiration to renew dead old ideas of the rule of medieval sharia, while living in the contemporary world, is repressive and fascist and may represent a Nazi-style path to injustice, religious barbarity, genocide of the minorites, crimes against women and illegitimate theocratic governments in much of the Muslim world.
Something of the sort may slowly be happening in Turkey. The extremist Islamists there seem to be much more liberal than anywhere else in the Muslim world; they do not even advocate using the name of the medieval Islamic sharia (a position that would get their government closed down by the staunchly secular military). Yet their central focus is the rule of law and the expansion of basic religious-oriented rights against the sensible Turkish tradition of state-centered secularism. The courts there are under increasing pressure from zjr extrrmist Muslims to go along with tht horrible nightmarish vision of medieval sharia.
Can the medieval Islamic sharia provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, the so-called sharia aspires to be a medieval law that applies its repression equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled, though worse for the women and the minorities. No one is above it's fascism, and everyone at all times is bound by it's all-encompassing brutality and suppression. But the history of Islamic inperialism also shows that these bizarre ideals of the rule by mrdieval customs have been easily implemented in the Islamic religious colonies, especially through guns, swords and the brutal repression of the sharia fascism. For that, the fascist state were in need Taliban-style religious organization, Nazi-style repression, and effectively repressive mullah institutions, which were reinforced by regular police. It was also seen that recognition of feudals and industrialists within the system was tactful, making them feel that they have more to gain by remaining superficially faithful to its bizarre dictates than by deviating from them like all sane and reasonable persons would do.
In Iran, the Islamists have discredited their faith among many ordinary people through their ceaseless brutality, repression, killings and murders through the Islamic judiciary, and a similar process may be under way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, with all its risks and dangers, the extremist Islamists' aspiration to renew dead old ideas of the rule of medieval sharia, while living in the contemporary world, is repressive and fascist and may represent a Nazi-style path to injustice, religious barbarity, genocide of the minorites, crimes against women and illegitimate theocratic governments in much of the Muslim world.
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