What Does Shari’a Really Mean?

In August, Representative Joe Walsh spoke to constituents at a town hall meeting in Elk Grove, Illinois, about radical Islam, noting, “It’s in Addison. It’s in Elgin. It’s here.” Walsh, a Republican congressman whose district includes many of Chicago’s northern suburbs, called for “godly men and women in the Senate, in the Congress … [to] stand in the face of the danger of Islam in America without political correctness.” The next Muslim attack against America, he warned, “will make 9/11 look like child’s play.”

Walsh’s depiction of radical Islam fits into the popular narrative that Islam is “creeping” into the political and social cultures of the United States, biding its time before Islamists take over America by force. This creeping takes many forms. If you ask Michele Bachmann, the Muslim Brotherhood might be infiltrating the U.S. government through the most unlikely of Manchurian candidates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief deputy, Huma Abedin. If you ask Peter King, shari’a creep is a “stealth jihad” to institute hardline Islamic law in the American judicial system itself.

It’s a powerful narrative, one that is popular among politicians and American pundits who, intentionally or not, stoke anti-shari’a flames and conflate Islam with radicalism. But anti-shari’a talk is not just about political bluster or website hits. The talk is actually becoming law. Since 2011, according to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), 73 bills have been introduced in 31 states, seeking to limit or bar the use of “foreign law” in American courts. Most often, the phrase “foreign law” is a thinly veiled euphemism for shari’a. In May, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a so-called “shari’a bill,” making his state the first to ban courts from using Islamic law when considering legal decisions. In August, Kentucky Representative Kim King pre-filed a similar bill for the 2013 congressional session.

Often the American politicians who propose anti-shari’a legislation, and the many journalists who report on it, reduce Islamic law to a set of anti-modern, anti-women dictates formulated in seventh-century Arabia—dictates that only survive in the twenty-first century through the autocratic rule of some Muslim clerics. But for almost all American Muslims, and much of the Islamic world, shari’a is not this. And shari’a is so much more.
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