“Practicing Muslims Can’t Disavow ‘Sharia’ Even If They Wanted To”

As a professor at Georgetown University and Washington Post columnist, Shadi Hamid is a made guy in today’s leftist establishment, and it is from those positions of oracular authority that he has delivered a sobering message to the growing movement to ban Sharia in the United States. In the WaPo on Wednesday, he declared that Muslims should not have to assimilate into American society and should not be expected to do so, and that efforts to ban Sharia were not only bigoted and “Islamophobic,” but also futile, as Muslims simply weren’t going to give Sharia up. And he’s right about that part, albeit in the midst of being wildly disingenuous about the nature of Sharia itself.

This being the Washington Post, and the leftist establishment being what it is, Hamid strikes the expected victimhood pose. He complains that “the Sharia-Free America Caucus has swelled to 60 House members. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) recently said, ‘I’m ready to get rid of the Muslims.’” Hamid claims that this sort of thing is completely unjustified in the face of evidence that Muslims are loyal, patriotic Americans: “The instinct, when faced with this, is to marshal the evidence. Over the past decade, surveys have shown that American Muslims are patriotic, civically engaged and more likely than the U.S. general public to say that political violence is never justified. You’d think that would be enough. Except it shouldn’t have to be. And this is where it gets uncomfortable — for me, at least.”

Hamid is uncomfortable because he believes that Muslims in America shouldn’t be expected to become like other Americans. “The assimilation defense — look how well we’ve integrated — is satisfying to make. But it concedes a premise I no longer accept: that a minority community’s right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream. It shouldn’t depend on that. It shouldn’t depend on anything.”

Muslims are different, he says, and that’s a good thing: “This is where the conversation needs to shift, and where it becomes less about politics and more about culture: Muslims are different in certain ways. How could they not be? Islam shapes how its adherents think about family, sexuality and what it means to live a good life. Simply put, Islam is also a more public religion than Christianity. Muslim prayer is visually striking and often communal. If a Muslim doesn’t drink alcohol or fasts during Ramadan, that will be more noticeable to others. Moreover, practicing Muslims — despite being repeatedly asked to — can’t disavow ‘sharia’ even if they wanted to. Sharia, roughly translated as Islamic law, includes guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God in daily practice.”

The bad faith that is manifest in this and all other recent defenses of Sharia against the supposedly bigoted “Islamophobes” who are trying to oppose it is that all these defenses of Sharia completely ignore the political, supremacist, expansionist, and violent aspects of Sharia, and bank on their audience’s ignorance of the fact that those aspects even exist. Hamid, as a professor at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Islamic apologetics mill, the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), certainly knows that Sharia isn’t simply about “guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God in daily practice,” and that it asserts authority over non-Muslims and institutionalizes discrimination against non-Muslims in numerous ways.

Yet he doesn’t come even close to hinting that those aspects of Sharia exist. Anyone who isn’t sure whether Hamid or I are telling the truth about this need only look at the fact that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and several other Muslim countries are Sharia states. Their entire systems of law are based on Sharia. If Sharia were simply religious governing one’s observance of Muslim practices, that would make no sense.

Shadi Hamid, however, as a Georgetown professor and Washington Post columnist, is a cosseted member of the leftist establishment. That establishment has decreed that anyone who is outside that establishment and questions anyone within it is simply a racist “Islamophobe,” and thus safely ignored. Shadi Hamid is thereby freed of any obligation to confront the reality of Sharia or his disingenuousness in this article. He can and will simply wave it away as “bigotry.” And the whole charade will go merrily on.