Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind Cordoba House, the giant mosque and Islamic cultural center planned just two blocks from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, speaks of tolerance. Yet he promotes one of the most intolerant sociopolitical systems on the planet: Shari’a law.
In 2009, Rauf’s organization, the Cordoba Initiative, launched a program to measure how closely various nations conform to Shari’a. An article quotes him musing about the criteria to be applied:
What are the principles that make a state Islamic? We can say among them is justice, protection of religion and minorities, and elimination of poverty, and so on.
Three possibilities: 1) Rauf believes that Shari’a is all flowers and rainbows and that modern-day Islamic states exhibit Western-style justice, protection, etc.; 2) he thinks the same of Shari’a, but maintains that Iran, Sudan, etc. have failed because their version of it is corrupted; or 3) he knows the unsavory truth about Shari’a and consciously dissimulates. None is comforting: the first two qualify as self-delusion; the third, as taqiyya. Place your money on the second or third.
Of course, any of them could explain his assertion that principles underlying the Declaration of Independence and secular U.S. law are “similar” to those of Shari’a. Indeed, Rauf argues:
Many Muslims believe that what Americans receive from their government is in fact the very substance of what an Islamic state should provide. American beliefs in individual liberty and the dignity of the individual are Islamic principles as well.
The addition of Shari’a law to “the law of the land,” in this case British law, complements, rather than undermines, existing legal frameworks. The archbishop was right. It is time for Britain to integrate aspects of Islamic law.
Yes, the project has momentum. But it is not too late for the mayor and others to hear your voice.
