Can You Rely on Reliance?

Reliance of the Traveller is an authoritative summary of Shafii-one of the four schools of thought in Sunni jurisprudence. Shafii is considered to be the most stringent of the four, but it's also widely accepted around the world. The book itself is one of the best sellers at the Islamic Society of North America website and is endorsed by preeminent leaders, such as Dr. Taha Jabir al-Alwani of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, who said, "There is no doubt that this translation is a valuable and important work, whether as a textbook for teaching Islamic jurisprudence to English speakers, or as a legal reference for use by scholars, educated laymen, and students in this language." Reliance of the Traveller has also been endorsed by al-Azhar University in Cairo, the preeminent institute of Islamic learning, which stated, "We certify that this translation corresponds to the Arabic original and conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community (Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jama'a)."

Ijma: This can be loosely translated as "consensus" of the Muslim community, especially of Muslim scholars (ulemaa). It is one of the main sources of law and ethics in Islam.

Qiyas: The process of reasoning by analogy, during which the teachings of the Sunna and Hadith are compared with those of the Quran. This is used primarily when Islamic law comes in conflict with the laws of other societies or religions.

The most comprehensive English language translation of shariah can be found in a book titled Reliance of the Traveller. This book has been authenticated by the Fiqh Council of North America, a group that advises its members on how to apply shariah within the "North American environment," and has been "approved" by scholars under the jurisdiction of Saudi Arabia.

All of that is a long-winded way of saying that this book was not written by someone with an axe to grind against Islam; it is considered by many scholars to be a legitimate and fair translation. Knowing that, most Americans who read Reliance of the Traveller will be (or at least should be) struck by how brutal and cruel shariah can be. And yet this book is sold by major Islamic outlets in America as a primary source of Islamic law for orthodox Sunni Muslims. Some argue that few Muslims actually follow its guidance. Thankfully, that is true, especially in the United States. Yet how many Muslims in the West have even attempted to deconstruct it or marginalize it? How many Muslims stand up and unequivocally say "That is not the Islam we follow!"?

Shariah classifies women as inferior beings and it provides them with considerably fewer privileges than a man. For example, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a female may be punished beginning at age nine; a boy not until age fifteen. Beating and raping one's wife is authorized and, by some interpretations, even encouraged. A woman's testimony in court is valued at half that of a man.

Shariah calls for the amputation of a thief's right hand. (The right is used for eating, while the left hand is used for personal hygiene. Eating with one's left hand is, therefore, considered unclean.) If the thief commits a second offense, his left foot is amputated. A third offense means his left hand, and if he steals again, he loses his right foot.

Shariah is in direct conflict with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because it mandates the denial of free speech and freedom of religion. In 2006, a Muslim posted a question to the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America asking how he should respond to questions about the punishment for apostates (those who leave Islam). The answer, according to Sheikh Mohammed Al-Hajj Aly, was that "it is the punishment of killing for the man . . . as the prophet, prayers and peace of Allah be upon him, said: 'Whoever a Muslim changes his/her religion, kill him/her.'"

Muslim supremacy is a constant theme of shariah, and Holy War (jihad) against nonbelievers is required of all adherents. The shariah texts like Reliance of the Traveller confirm this death sentence mandate for apostates. Youcef Nadarkhani, a Christian pastor in Iran, was ordered to be executed not only because he left Islam, but because he refused to recant his faith in Christianity. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. To say that shariah can be repressive and cruel is an understatement.

An Islamic republic is a nation in which shariah is the law of the land, but Muslims are expected to adhere to shariah regardless of where they reside. Countries like Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia rely on shariah as their legal system. Even when living in a Western nation, Muslims are expected to use shariah as their guide for how to live and worship.

Secular Shariah?

It's counterintuitive, but there are some countries, like Somalia, where the government is secular, but shariah is still practiced. The Council on Foreign Relations quoted Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, a professor of law at Emory University, with a possible explanation for this: "Enforcing a [shariah] through coercive power of the state negates its religious nature, because Muslims would be observing the law of the state and not freely performing their religious obligation as Muslims."

That's all well and good for enlightened, modern, reform-minded Muslims who rely on reason, but it's not going to help the abuse of human rights inherent in shariah. Separating mosque and state is irrelevant if the followers of shariah prioritize their religious obligations ahead of their obligations as a citizen of that country and the laws of the land.

That, of course, includes Muslims in America.

Although many Muslims who live in the United States reject Islamic law, Islamic jurists and scholars, as well as a large number of imams, still mandate that they live according to the provisions of the law. That is an enormous problem considering that many academics and Islamic scholars have repeatedly said that shariah and democracy are incompatible.

Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, a professor of Islamic law in Islamabad, Pakistan, articulates this point in his book Theories of Islamic Law: The Methodology of Ijtihad. "Islam, it is generally acknowledged, is a complete way of life," he wrote, "and at the core of the code, is the law of Islam. . . . No other sovereign or authority is acceptable to the Muslim, unless it guarantees the application of the laws (shariah) in their entirety. Any other legal system, howsoever attractive it may appear on the surface, is alien for Muslims and it is not likely to succeed in the solution of their problems: it would be doomed from the start."

After reading that quote, and understanding what shariah is all about, you may feel as though there is no middle ground, no way out. But that is the big lie. Americans must understand that Nyazee's Islam is political Islam-the Islam of Islamists, of those who believe in the dominance of the Islamic state. We make a mistake when we try to equate Islamism with all of Islam or all Muslims.

In most Muslim communities there is a struggle for power between Islamists and moderate Muslims. We can blame that struggle on everything from oil money, to the dominance of the Muslim Brotherhood movement around the world, or to a million other things, but the bottom line is that much of the Muslim leadership continue to peddle Islamism (political Islam) as Islam.

SETTING A BAD PRECEDENT.

Despite the opinion of numerous scholars that many elements of shariah and democracy are not compatible, Islamic law continues to make its way into America. If you think that is just hyperbole or conspiracy theory, you're wrong. Here are the facts.

The Center for Security Policy recently reviewed fifty court cases from twenty-three states to determine if shariah had been used in deciding the outcomes. Their findings, detailed in the center's report "Shariah Law and American State Courts," might surprise you: The study's findings suggest that shariah law has entered into state court decisions, in conflict with the Constitution and state public policy. Some commentators have said there are no more than one or two cases of shariah law in U.S. state court cases; yet we found 50 significant cases just from the small sample of appellate published cases.

Others have asserted with certainty that state court judges will always reject any foreign law, including shariah law, when it conflicts with the Constitution or state public policy; yet we found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where shariah was found to be applicable in these particular cases. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.

The study, while eye-opening, is really only the tip of the iceberg. Abed Awad, an adjunct law professor at Rutgers University law school and a New York attorney who runs the site ShariaInAmerica.com, recently boasted that he had "handled as an expert, or consultant or attorney for, more than 100 cases (in the United States) with a component of Islamic Law or the laws of the Middle East in the past 11 years."

In February 2012, Pennsylvania state court judge Mark Martin dismissed an assault and harassment case against a Muslim man who attacked an atheist who was dressed in a "Zombie Muhammad" costume during a Halloween parade. The atheist man was pretending to walk among the dead and was joined by another individual dressed in a "Zombie Pope" costume.

From a U.S. legal perspective the assault case was pretty straightforward: the attacker allegedly admitted his guilt to a police officer. And while the act may have been offensive to some, the atheist was exercising his First Amendment right to express himself, along with his right to freedom of religion (or, in this case, no religion).

Judge Martin ruled that the atheist had offended the Muslim who assaulted him and that, according to Muslim belief, the man was compelled to defend his faith. In fact the judge dressed the victim down with a very harsh diatribe: Before you start mocking someone else's religion you may want to find out a little bit more about it. That makes you look like a doofus. . . .

Islam is not just a religion. It's their culture, their culture. It's their very essence, their very being. . . . Then what you have done is you have completely trashed their essence, their being. They find it very, very, very offensive. . . . It is not proven to me beyond a reasonable doubt that this defendant is guilty of harassment. Therefore, I am going to dismiss the charge.

Some interpretations of shariah require Muslims to respond violently to any insult directed against the Prophet Muhammad. And now we have a judge supporting these arcane laws that conflict with the very freedoms provided by the U.S. Constitution.

Stifling Debate

Abed Awad was also asked what he thought about the campaign to officially ban shariah law from the United States. I don't know about you, but I think he doth protest too much: Other than the fact that such bans are unconstitutional . . . they are [also] a monumental waste of time. Our judges are equipped with the constitutional framework to refuse to recognize a foreign law or take into account religious law. In the end, our Constitution is the law of the land. The only explanation is that they appear to be driven by an agenda infused with hate, ignorance and Islamophobia intent on dehumanizing an entire religious community. The fringe right-wing minority in our country is trying to turn this into a national 2012 election issue. Are you with the Shariah or with the U.S. Constitution? It is absurd.

Actually, what's absurd is for someone to inject "hate" and "ignorance" and "Islamophobia" into a legitimate debate in an attempt to shut it down.

Several states have recognized the problem and are trying to take action to protect their courts and arbitration systems from this encroachment. A Michigan lawmaker, for example, has proposed a bill that, according to the American Islamic Leadership Coalition, "is intended to bar Michigan courts from enforcing any foreign law, if doing so violates any rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and/or the state of Michigan's constitution." I can't believe we actually need to pass a law for that to be clear (I was pretty sure the Constitution was the supreme law of the land), but if that's what it takes, then that's what we need to do.

The Michigan law does not mention the words Islam or shariah, a fact that makes it much harder for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to complain that Muslims are being singled out. Other states (like Oklahoma) have attempted to pass laws targeted more specifically at Islamic law, but those attempts have generally been ruled unconstitutional.

Another tenet of Islamic law that makes it incompatible with our democracy is shariah-compliant finance (SCF). While this is not a concept that dates back to the days of the prophet Muhammad (as some Muslims would like us to believe), it is nonetheless an accepted part of Islamic law today. And it, too, has come to America.

Developed primarily by Sayyid Qutb, one of the early leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, SCF is a means of infiltrating financial markets and institutions for the purpose of integrating shariah into yet another element of society. While the general assumption is that an SCF transaction cannot include interest and cannot be associated with anything determined impure by Muslims, there is a far more sinister side to SCF transactions.

In order to be SCF compliant, a financial institution must have Islamic "advisers," or an advisory board that is deemed qualified to judge or issue "fatwas" (religious rulings) as to whether transactions are pure (halal) or impure (haram). This gives these advisers unprecedented insight into, and influence over, the activities of companies in America. In some cases, these advisers can advise who the companies deal with and how their transactions are accomplished. For example, they could object to a deal with an Israeli company on grounds that it is impure.

The idea that these transactions are without interest is also inaccurate. Zakat (a tithe or charitable donation) is one of the five pillars of Islam and is considered mandatory for every Muslim. Rather than charging interest on a loan, SCF lenders build in a healthy zakat up front. They also devise creative "lease-to-buy" schemes that mask interest as fees, all the while empowering Islamist clerics to control the finance system.

The charity component is also potentially troubling and deceptive. Among many areas of Islamic charity, shariah describes three categories of zakat that involve indirectly supporting jihad, and also explicitly providing support to Muslims who are fighting in the cause of Allah. Many, if not most, Muslims may be unaware of where the leadership of various charities in the faith community end up sending the money they put into the hands of these organizations. But that doesn't matter much when the leadership is driven by the ideology of Islamism, which mandates that zakat monies go to the poor or to jihad, "those fighting for Allah." The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), which was once the largest Muslim charity in America, was, in fact, shuttered and designated as a "Specially Designated National" by the U.S. Treasury for funneling funds to the terror organization Hamas under the guise of zakat.

"[Sharia law] seems unavoidable and indeed, as a matter of fact, certain provisions of Sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law; so it's not as if we're bringing in an alien and rival system. . . ."

-Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when asked if Sharia was necessary for social cohesion in Britain THE BROTHERHOOD.

In 2004, a Maryland Transportation Authority police officer performed a traffic stop on a car in which a Muslim woman in traditional Islamic dress was filming the support structure of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge out the window. The woman's husband, Ismail Elbarasse, who was driving the car, was arrested for an outstanding material witness warrant that had been issued in Chicago. The Elbarasses' home in Annandale, Virginia, was searched, and a hidden subbasement was located. The FBI discovered that the basement housed the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

According to the book Shariah: The Threat to America, these documents "confirmed what investigators and counterterrorism experts had suspected and contended about the myriad Muslim-American groups in the United States-namely, that the vast majority of them are controlled by the MB (Muslim Brotherhood) and, therefore, as their Shariah dictates, are hostile to this country, it's Constitution and freedoms. The documents make clear that the groups' sole objectives are to implement Islamic law in America in furtherance of the goal of reestablishing the global caliphate."

I know, I know, caliphate is a dirty, conspiracy-theory-laden word. Those who talk about it are craaaazy, or, in the words of our attorney friend Abed Awad, they're "infused with hate, ignorance and Islamophobia intent on dehumanizing an entire religious community." Or, maybe there's another explanation. Maybe it's those who want to pretend that this does not exist, or keep Americans in the dark about it, who are actually the ones filled with hate and ignorance. Maybe these documents about the global caliphate and the Brotherhood's plans are actually a sign of a deeper, far more pervasive problem among many Muslims: the supremacy of political Islam.

More on that later, but for now, back to those archives recovered from the Elbarasses' basement. Included in them was a five-phase plan for how the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups plan to turn America into an Islamic country. I know, we all have plans, big deal. (I planned to be a magician when I was younger, so I get it: man plans, God laughs.) But there's a good reason to pay attention to these particular plans: there's already a road map for how this works. It's not quick, it's not easy-but it's definitely possible.

About a decade ago, most Europeans would have laughed in your face at the suggestion that Islam might one day find a home there. Yet, today, almost all of the experts, including Princeton's Bernard Lewis, the most renowned expert on Islam in the United States, are stating emphatically that by the end of this century "at the very latest," Europe will be predominantly Islamic.

Quality, Not Quantity

It's not really the number or percentage of Muslims in any population that should concern people (just as no one worries about the "percentage of Catholics" in a country)-it's whether those Muslims follow a politicized version of Islam. Bassam Tibi, a prominent moderate Muslim in Germany, summed up the issue pretty well: "Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized. . . . The problem is not whether the majority of Europeans is Islamic, but rather which Islam-sharia Islam or Euro-Islam-is to dominate in Europe."

The Europeans made the same mistakes that we are making right now: They did not take the idea seriously. They simply buried their heads in the sand and either bought the propaganda of the distractors or bought into the political correctness and decided to "mind their own business." They tried to appease the very groups that were out to take over their countries by allowing them to incrementally integrate shariah into European societies.

Soeren Kern, senior fellow at the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group, recently wrote an article about the proliferation of private Muslim enclaves in Europe: Islamic extremists are stepping up the creation of "no-go" areas in European cities that are off-limits to non-Muslims.

Many of the "no-go" zones function as microstates governed by Islamic Shariah law. Host-country authorities effectively have lost control in these areas and in many instances are unable to provide even basic public aid such as police, fire fighting and ambulance services.

The "no-go" areas are the by-product of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.

This self-segregation has encouraged and strengthened Muslim groups in Britain. One group has initiated a program called the "Islamic Emirates Project" with the stated intent of modeling several cities all over Britain as areas for Islamic law. Many experts estimate that there are already eighty-five shariah courts in Britain operating outside British common law. The result is that Christian preachers, for example, have been accused of hate crimes for handing out Christian material in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods.

France is not faring much better. According to Kern, their "no-go" areas are made up of 751 so-called "Sensitive Urban Zones" (ZUS), encompassing five million Muslims. The French government has a website, complete with exact addresses and satellite maps so that non-Muslims can avoid these areas.

Freedom Takes a Detour

Given France's history with riots, the government is very cautious in the way it handles these enclaves, for fear of inciting more of them. This kid-gloves approach is great until you consider how it affects the non-Muslim population. For example, in some areas Muslims are allowed to essentially take over streets and sidewalks for Friday prayers. There are plenty of YouTube videos showing what this looks like, and there's been plenty of outrage about it-yet nothing seems to be done. Why would any group of people'whether they've come together to pray, riot, or protest-be allowed to take over public walkways and streets at the exclusion of others?

You'd be hard-pressed to find a part of Europe that has not been affected in some way by the growth of Islam: In some parts of Belgium police cruisers travel throughout "no-go" zones in pairs. The first squad goes about their business, and the second car looks out for the first.

In Germany, the police commissioner was asked about these "no-go" areas and how they are patrolled. He responded: "Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it. But of course we know where we can go with the police car and where, even initially, only with the personnel carrier. The reason is that our colleagues can no longer feel safe there in pairs, and have to fear becoming the victim of a crime themselves. We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to police it 'among themselves.' Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture."

Similar situations exist in Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and Europe is now watching its nations being destroyed by the infiltration of shariah into every corner of society. Proponents call it "multiculturalism" and tolerance-but when a nation no longer has a common bond keeping it together, then tolerance and political correctness won't matter much.

THE BROTHERHOOD EXPLAINS THE CALIPHATE.

With Europe setting the precedent for how shariah can be slowly integrated into society, let's turn our attention back to America.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned the trouble that the Holy Land Foundation found itself in, but it's worth looking at that trial in more detail. Known as the "Holy Land Foundation Trial," the case concluded with five defendants being convicted of all (108) counts of raising funds in America to support Hamas, a State Departmentlisted terrorist organization and an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, under the guise of charity.

One of the documents entered into evidence during the trial had been found in the Elbarasses' subbasement in 2004. It is the Muslim Brotherhood's strategic plan for North America, titled "An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group." The author was Mohammad Akram (aka Mohammad Adlouni), a member of the board of directors for the Brotherhood in America and a senior leader in Hamas.

Crazy Caliphate Conspiracy Critic: Bill Kristol

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

-WILLIAM KRISTOL, EDITOR OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD *