Two Books Cannot Govern One Street

Leave a CommentTwo Books Cannot Govern One StreetCommentary, Politics

The men who want the House back in November have a drawer full of issues and a habit of talking about the wrong ones. Prices move votes. The war moves votes. A foreign legal code that sorts people by sex and creed, and that Republican primary voters have already rejected by twenty to one, has mostly been left in the drawer. It is time to take it out and read it, because the argument is not about prayer rugs. It is about who gets a full share of the law.

What it is

Sharia is not a rumor and not a slur. It is the religious law of Islam, drawn from the Quran and the traditions of the prophet, worked over for centuries by jurists into rules for worship, family, commerce, crime, and the state. There is no single statute book. The schools differ on detail. They do not differ on the architecture.

The architecture is this. God legislates. The believer submits. The ruler, where the system is in force, applies God’s sentences. Private life and public law are not separate rooms. A marriage, an inheritance, a blasphemy, a conversion, and a theft can all be religious offenses with religious penalties. In the classical criminal law those penalties include flogging, amputation for theft, and, in the stricter schools and in several countries that still use them, stoning for adultery and death for leaving the faith. Homosexual acts are a capital crime in the same books, and in the places that enforce them. Jews and Christians, if tolerated, are a protected but lesser class, historically taxed and barred from full equality. A woman’s inheritance is half a man’s. Her testimony in money matters is weighted below a man’s. She may be one of up to four wives. A guardian speaks for her in marriage. Critics of the prophet, including Muslim critics, are blasphemers.

That is not an internet summary. It is the law as written and, in Afghanistan, Iran, northern Nigeria, parts of Pakistan, and the Gulf monarchies in varying degrees, the law as used. A woman who fled Somalia and later sat for a Senate hearing has spent twenty years saying the same thing in plainer words. Under that code she is not a citizen. She is a subject.

What it is not

It is not a Muslim saying his prayers. It is not a halal butcher, a mosque, or a fasting month. Those are exercises of a religion, and the Constitution already covers them. A ban aimed at the contents of a man’s head, or at the right to assemble for worship, would not survive a court and should not be written.

It is also not the same thing as a Jewish rabbinical court or a Catholic annulment. Those bodies decide religious questions for people who walk in the door. They cannot collect a debt the civil court has voided, they cannot jail an apostate, and they cannot tell a woman her civil divorce is void because a council of men has not released her. The line is supremacy. Religious arbitration that loses when it meets a statute is ordinary American life. Religious law that expects the statute to move is a different claim.

No American city is under Sharia. The Constitution still outranks a sermon. What exists, and what the argument is actually about, is the demand that enclaves, councils, and family tribunals be left alone to apply rules the civil law forbids, and the political project that treats objection to those rules as bigotry.

Who pays

The first bill goes to women. In Britain, unofficial councils have for years pressed wives to return to husbands the civil courts had already freed them from, and to trade their civil rights for a religious divorce. Inheritance splits, custody assumptions, and the presumption that a father or brother speaks for an adult woman travel with the doctrine even when the amputation does not. Honor violence is not in the statute. It is in the enforcement, and the victims are daughters.

The second bill goes to people who leave. Classical jurisprudence treats apostasy as a public crime, not a private change of mind. Converts, doubters, and reformers in the countries that apply the code are jailed, hunted, or killed. A legal order that cannot tolerate an exit is not a private piety. It is a trap.

The third bill goes to religious minorities and to gay people. The protected second class is still a second class. The death penalty for homosexual acts is not a metaphor in the places that use it. A code that cannot sit alongside equal protection is telling you, in advance, who it intends to rank.

The fourth bill goes to Muslim reformers, who catch it from both sides. The doctrine marks them as traitors. Western officials often mark them as inconvenient, because a frank description of the law spoils the talking point that this is only about private faith.

Where the argument already is

Texas put the question to its Republican primary voters on March 3. Proposition 10 was advisory and non-binding. It asked whether the state should prohibit Sharia law. The count was 1,903,489 yes and 104,290 no, 94.8 percent to 5.2. In June the state party made the ban a legislative priority and asked Washington to denaturalize and deport advocates of the code. The governor told a Dallas convention on September 10 that Texas would fully ban it. A House caucus formed last December to press a national version has grown past sixty members. Its bills are still in committee. None has passed.

The same month, a lawsuit landed against Dearborn, Michigan, alleging that a Muslim-majority city government has favored Islam and chilled Christians and Jews. A planned development outside Dallas became a fight over whether a Muslim-led town would run its own courts. In Michigan the Democratic Senate nominee is a Muslim man the vice president has called evil over his remarks after an attack on a synagogue. A survey published this fall found 76 percent of Republicans, and 29 percent of Democrats, saying Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence. In 2002 those figures were 32 and 23.

None of that is a statute. All of it is a voter already ahead of his party.

Whether it nationalizes November

A generic ballot does not turn on a doctrine most candidates will not say out loud. Prices and the war are doing the heavy lifting, and both currently cut against the party in power. A cultural question works when it is concrete, when the other side cannot answer it, and when it sorts a coalition.

This one qualifies. Ask a candidate whether a religious council may overrule a civil divorce. Ask whether leaving a faith can be a crime. Ask whether a daughter’s inheritance may be half her brother’s by statute. Ask whether a city may treat one religion’s street prayer as a right and another’s objection as hate. The answers sort the parties without a seminar. The Democratic nominee in Texas has spent the fall calling himself a capitalist who knows there are two sexes. He has not been asked, on a stage, whether a third legal system may rank those sexes. The Senate nominee in Michigan has a record on Israel and on a synagogue attack. He has not been forced to say whether the religious law of his tradition may ever bind a nonbeliever.

The risk is sloppiness. A ban written as “no Muslims” loses in court and deserves to. A ban written as “no foreign legal code shall displace equal protection, criminal law, or the rights of women and apostates in any court or arbitration this government recognizes” is ordinary sovereignty. States have passed versions of the second for a decade. The federal version is sitting in a drawer while consultants argue about tone.

Primary voters in the largest red state already settled the tone, 95 to 5. The people most likely to suffer if the code gains ground are not the consultants. They are the wife who cannot get a divorce the council will honor, the convert who cannot go home, and the daughter assigned half a share before she can speak. A party that will not say that out loud between now and November 3 is leaving a winning issue in the drawer, and leaving those people to find out what the fine print was for.