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The far Left George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has been busy of late trying to “expose” those evil hatemongering “Islamophobes” and their enablers who have the audacity to tell the truth about Sharia law and Islamic ideology. CAP’s most recent publication in this regard is entitled “Fear, Inc.,” which claims that a “small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts” has been “spreading myths and lies about Islam.”
The uncredentialed authors of “Fear, Inc.” – all part of the Center for American Progress rather than outside experts on Islam – are truthophobes. They seek, in their words, to “marginalize” such people as Nonie Darwish, a woman raised as a Muslim who lived in Egypt under the yoke of Sharia law for thirty years and has provided first-hand accounts of its brutality.
Other articles on this site have already demonstrated the shoddiness, illogic and outright untruths permeating “Fear, Inc.” I am not going to repeat the obvious. Instead, I want to focus on what one of the world’s leading Islamic scholars says about Sharia law, which is far closer to how the so-called Islamophobes who are the targets of CAP’s invective describe Sharia than to the CAP authors’ idealized version.
In “Fear, Inc.,” the authors describe Sharia as nothing more than the “Muslim religious code,” focusing on “charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism.”
In a previous CAP publication entitled “Understanding Sharia Law Conservatives’ Skewed Interpretation Needs Debunking,” written by two of the same Center for American Progress authors who participated in writing “Fear, Inc.,” Sharia is described as “personal religious law and moral guidance for the vast majority of Muslims.” The “core values” of Sharia, say the authors, are “theological and ethical and not political” and are “in harmony with the core values at the heart of America.”
To see if this benign characterization of Sharia can possibly be true, I consulted the writings of one of the most prominent Muslim scholars in the world today, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is listed as fourteenth out of 500 of the world’s influential Muslim figures, according to the most recent study released by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center and the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.
A Foreign Policy Magazine reader poll on the “the world’s top 100 public intellectuals,” posted on a blog edited by one of the “Fear, Inc.” authors, Wajahat Ali, confirmed Qaradawi’s high standing. Based on 500,000 votes cast, Qaradawi came in third.
Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was one of the scholars who endorsed the 2004 “Amman Message,” a document the CAP authors rely on to show what they called “the dynamic, interpretive tradition of Islam in practice.”
Does Qaradawi agree with the CAP authors’ description of Sharia as “not political” and “in harmony with the core values at the heart of America”? Not a chance. As he explains in his book, “Al-Din wal-Siyasa” (Religion and Politics), all Islamic scholars agree that Sharia embraces the law, the state, religion and politics:
The Islamic shari’ah governs all of the actions of those who are obligated (to it). There is no act or occurrence which exists without a corresponding ruling from one of the five shari’ah rulings (obligatory, recommended, prohibited, reprehensible, or permitted). This has been confirmed by fundamentalists and scholars from every faction and school of thought associated with Islam… Whoever reads the books of the Islamic shari’ah, I mean the books of Islamic jurisprudence, in its different schools of thought, will find that they comprise all of the affairs of life, from the jurisprudence of purity, to that of the family, society, and the state. This is very clear for every elementary student, not to mention those in the world who are more capable.
Moreover, Qaradawi said that Sharia is not a pick-and-choose menu, as CAP’s authors would have us believe. Islam “rejects the partitioning of its rulings and teachings,” he declared. Nor is Sharia an ever evolving religious guidepost for human behavior, subject to change by human beings. “Shariah cannot be amended to conform to changing human values and standards,” said Qaradawi.
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