BOSTOM: Sanitizing Sharia Will Destroy Freedom

Islamic apologists have whitewashed sharia for decades. Now young Americans support imposing it even on citizens who want no part of it.

The peerless scholar Dr. Andrew Bostom lays out the betrayal: educators sanitize coercive religious laws, conceal their assault on free speech and equal rights, and leave students unequipped to recognize what they are embracing. His warning is blunt: proselytizing for Islam and sanitizing religious laws that punish dissent and deny equal rights prepares a generation to surrender the Bill of Rights in the name of tolerance.

This is indoctrination with devastating consequences—preparing a generation to vote away its birthright.

Sanitizing Sharia Will Destroy Freedom

By: Dr. Andrew Bostom, RAIR Foundation, October 31, 2026

Decades of sanitized, apologetic ‘education’ about Islam have indoctrinated a generation of young Americans into viewing Sharia – a totalitarian political system of open-ended jihad, suppression of conscience and speech, discrimination against non-Muslims and women, and barbaric punishments – as positive, beneficial, and even fit for majority-vote imposition in U.S. towns and states, directly subverting the Bill of Rights.

Renowned scholar of Islam, Maxime Rodinson (d. 2004), in 1974 observed that the academic “post-colonial Left,” among whom were prominent converts to Islam, had already abandoned objective teaching about Islam. Instead, Rodinson averred, they chose to “sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim world.” Rodinson concluded, ruefully, that academic instruction on Islam had devolved into proselytism:

“Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and simple.”

Multiple generations of such “academic higher education” about Islam has percolated down to secondary schools.

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During 2010, I exposed the egregious bias of the “Global History and Geography” Regent’s scholarship examinations for New York State High School students. This was evident in both the student testing questions, and requisite teacher evaluation guidelines for test responses. The materials on Islam were nothing less than Islamic proselytizing on the one hand, versus the inculcation of cynicism, if not contempt, for Christianity and Western Christian civilization on the other. For example, the 16^th century Spanish Christian conquests in South America were presented as unmitigated, ghastly depredations. In contrast, Islam’s brutal, sanguinary campaigns of jihad conquest during the “8th to 11th century” were summarized, risibly, by this blanket reductio ad absurdum Regents claim: “wherever they went, the Moslems brought with them their love of art, beauty, and learning.” The actual jihad conquests in this period featured massacre, pillage, deportation, and mass enslavement, with the punitive imposition of Islam’s deliberately debasing, discriminatory, and often pauperizing “Islamic Law,” or Sharia on the surviving non-Muslims who refused to convert to the Muslim creed.

The long-term corrosive effect of relentless Islamic indoctrination on American youth under the guise of education was apparent in ominous recent polling data on the favorability, “benefits,” and even potential applicability of Sharia in the U.S.

A nationally representative survey of 1026 U.S. Likely Voters conducted on 9/20/26 asked the following about Sharia:

“Sharia is a system of Islamic religious principles and law. Do you have a positive or negative opinion about Sharia?”

“Would you support a law that requires public schools to teach kids about the benefits of Sharia law?”

“If a majority of people in an American town, city, or state were to want Sharia law, would you support a proposal that would allow Sharia to become the legal code for all citizens in that town, city, or state?”

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Disturbing percentages of 18- to 24-year-olds (43%) and 25- to 29-year-olds (39%) had combined “mostly” or “somewhat” favorable views of Sharia. Moreover, 24% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 29-year-olds supported a legal requirement that children be taught the alleged “benefits” of Sharia law. Most alarmingly, 27% of both the 18- to 24-year-olds and 25- to 29-year-olds favored allowing U.S. towns, cities, or entire states to apply Sharia for all citizens by plebiscite.

What is the actual Islamic Sharia “system” these 18- to 29-year-old Americans view “positively,” whose “benefits” they advocate teaching to U.S. children, and even favor implementing statewide by majority popular vote?

Sharia, Islam’s “divine law,” is derived from its most important foundational texts –the Qur’an and hadith (the canonical collections of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s deeds and pronouncements) – and their interpretation and codification by Islam’s greatest classical and contemporary legists. Intellectually honest discussion of Sharia must begin with recognition that it is an inherently political system, and is not confined to religious rituals, regulating everything from the governance of a Muslim minority community or an Islamic state, bloc of states, or global Islamic order. Accordingly, Sharia is “doubly totalitarian” in the apt description of the great French scholar of Islamic law Bousquet.

Liberty-crushing and dehumanizing, Sharia’s political dimensions feature open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties – including freedom of conscience and speech—enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and of even Muslim women, to subservient chattel; and barbaric, mandatory “hadd” punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.

At the most rudimentary level, Western Judeo-Christian and Islamic conceptions of freedom are antithetical. Following Sharia slavishly is paramount to “hurriyya,” freedom in Islam. Hurriyya’s metaphysical meaning was pronounced by the Sufi scholar al-Qushayri (d. 1072/74):

…Anyone who imagines that it may be granted to a human being to give up his slavery for a moment and disregard the commands and prohibitions of the religious law [Sharia] while possessing discretion and responsibility, has divested himself of Islam.”

Since 1990, the Organization of the Islamic Conference/ Cooperation (OIC)—the largest voting bloc in the United Nations—has been pushing a Sharia-based framework for “human rights”—the Cairo Declaration—which would abrogate existing instruments much more protective of human freedom and dignity, including the U.S. Bill of Rights. The Cairo Declaration’s last articles, 24 and 25, maintain all rights derive from the Sharia, exclusively, while articles 10, 19, and 22 make plain that draconian Sharia-based “punishments”—death, incarceration with corporal punishment–apply to “blasphemers” of Islam, or “apostates” from Islam. Thus Islam, via its integrally-related, Sharia supremacist global OIC—unparalleled in our era relative to any other religion—seeks to abrogate basic freedoms of conscience and expression that define free, non-totalitarian, non-Muslim societies.

Beginning immediately, the entire U.S. educational infrastructure must cease its grotesque misrepresentation of Islam’s Sharia and provide objective pedagogy on the Sharia’s incompatibility with fundamental U.S. liberties enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

 Dr. Andrew Bostom, MD, MS is a scholar of Islam’s historical interactions with non-Muslims whose major works include “The Legacy of Jihad,” “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,” “Sharia Versus Freedom,” and most recently, “A Modern Qur’anic Kampf Against the Jews”.