Why Islamic Law is the Antithesis of Equal Justice
Posted: 04 Aug 2009 07:07 PM PDT
In Sudan a dozen women were sentenced to be flogged for wearing pants. Some
of them were Christian, but that has never really mattered, as the
essential premise of Islamic law is that it is inherently superior to
every other law. Naturally no men have ever been sentenced for wearing
pants. That is a law that applies only to women, because there is a
fundamental difference between Islamic law and Western law, not simply in
morality or structure-- but in equality.
A Muslim man will never be sentenced to be flogged for wearing pants, just
as a Muslim Imam will never be tried for blasphemy no matter how many ugly
things he says about Hindusim, Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism.
Blasphemy is a charge that is meaningful only in relation to the doctrine
that is at the heart of Islamic law, that is Islam itself.
Islamic law is law made by Muslim men for the benefit of Muslim men, and the
detriment of everyone else. It is the product of an inherently unequal
system, designed to perpetuate that system.
Under it non-Muslims
are inferior to Muslims because by rejecting the "truth" of Islam, they
cast doubts about their moral fitness. A non-Muslim is an infidel who
drinks alcohol, eats pork and has forbidden sexual relations. As far as
Islamic law is concerned he is already of poor moral character and a
criminal.
Women are inferior to men, as they are lower in status
than men. When Mohammed declared, or was said to declare in Islamic
scripture, that, "I also saw the Hell-fire and I had never seen such a
horrible sight. I saw that most of the inhabitants were women", he was
articulating the top down theology of a cult that defined sinfulness in
terms of position of tribal power. Therefore in the Mohammedan vision of
hell, the underworld was to be populated mostly by women for their
ingratitude to their husbands, who under Islam were also their masters.
And slaves are defined as moral to the degree that they serve their
masters.
Under the circular logic of Islam, women are second class
citizens because they are untrustworthy, and untrustworthy because they
are second class citizens. This makes women automatically suspect of all
sorts of things.
It is why a woman who was raped is more at fault
than the man who raped her. In the Islamic worldview, which is itself a
carryover of Bedouin tribalism, a rapist has taken someone else's
property. By contrast the woman who was raped was careless with the
property of her husband or her father. Whether the woman had consensual
sex or was raped does not matter very much, because in either case she is
only property that was damaged. Not a human being. The honor killing is
simply a male relative or spouse destroying what Islamic tribalism
considers to be "damaged property". Her consent is not considered
significant, because Islamic law does not take the agency of a woman
seriously, or treat her as competent to make decision on the level of a
man in the first place.
It is why the woman is always at fault.
While Western jurisprudence considers diminished capacity to be an
extenuating circumstance, Islamic jurisprudence considers it to be a
statement of guilt. That is because Western jurisprudence presumes
innocence, while Islamic jurisprudence presumes guilt. The lower the role,
the more readily the presumption of guilt is applied. Since Islam treats
all people as inherently sinful, and therefore perpetually guilty, the
higher the form of awareness, the more likely the Muslim is to avoid sin.
A Muslim mam has more agency than a woman, and is more likely to do the
right thing. A Muslim woman is considered to have less agency, which is
why she must have a husband to master her, and why Islam considers her
more likely to be at fault.
Like slaves, women can only demonstrate
their worth through submission to their masters. Muslim men in turn can
only demonstrate their worth through submission to the will of Allah as
expressed by the Imams. Since the core of Islamic law is held by Arab
Muslims, they effectively serve as superior to non-Arab Muslims. And
throughout it all, one thing is missing. Equality under the law and equal
justice for all.
 If there is one thing that is innate to the
functioning of a democratic society, it is that every person is legally
equal under the law. It is also why Islamic Law or Sharia, is incompatible
with a democratic society, because Islamic law presumes the inequality of
everyone who is not a Muslim male as a given. Defenders of Sharia have
tried to get around this by pointing to the things that Islamic law did
not take away from women and non-Muslims while willfully ignoring the
things that it did take away.
This is a basic reality that
Westerners have been kept deliberately ignorant of. Yet the moment a
Western tourist sets foot in a Muslim country, she has left a system where
she is legally the equal of anyone else, and entered a system in which she
is dramatically unequal. A woman or any non-Muslim who enters a Muslim
country is now under the power of a legal system that considers her or him
inferior in morals, in character and in testimony.
At the heart of
the problem are the fundamentally different realities at the heart of law
in a democratic nation and within Islam.
Citizens of First World
nations see the legal system as part of a social contract with a
government of their choice. The law is the expression of the wishes and
values of the citizenry. And it treats everyone as inherently equal under
the law because otherwise fairness becomes impossible. By contrast Islamic
law is not part of any social contract, it is a decree of the Prophet and
the various Muslim figures throughout the ages who have interpreted his
sayings. It is not part of a bottom up civil society, it is a strictly top
down series of clauses that mixes tribal customs, stolen scraps of other
religions, with the determined will of a ruthless, though illiterate,
warlord.
Islam does not recognize human equality. It is premised on
human inequality. Women cannot be subject to the same laws as men, just as
Mohammed was not subject to the same laws as men. Indeed the Koran records
that Mohammed explicitly had the law rewritten on his behalf when he
desired something, such as Zaynab, who happened to be married to his
adopted son. A minor matter for the Prophet. The Koran also limited the
number of permissible wives to four. This did not stop Mohammed from
marrying as many as fifteen women. Muslims do not see the contradiction in
any of this, because there is no premise of equality under Islamic law.
You are only as "equal" as your spiritual standing within the Ummah
permits.
There is no "I" in Islam, except in the alphabetical
sense. Islam means participation in the Ummah, the dead Mohammed's
"Kingdom of Heaven" on earth, as exemplified by the Muslim community as a
whole, to be ideally expressed as the Caliphate that everyone from Al
Queda on down to a hundred different regional ethnic terrorist groups such
as Hamas, Abu Sayyaf, Hizbullah, the Taliban, Al-Ummah, Al-Faran and
numerous others. What they all have in common is the mandate to enforce
Islamic law as the only and absolute law, without any compromise, while
scourging away any traces of Western law or culture whose pernicious
individualism threatens the essential premise of the Ummah. 
The suicide bomber best expresses the contempt that Islam has for the
individual, whose life is better off sacrificed, often unnecessarily,
simply to prove the willingness of Muslim believers to kill in the name of
Islamic rule. There can be no middle ground of compromise between Islamic
law and civil law, because Sharia is not legal, it is religious. There can
be no concession to the rights of the individual, because Islam does not
recognize the worth of individuals or their power to make law, rather than
be subject to it.
It is why Islamic law is the antithesis of equal
justice under the law, and the two of them cannot co-exist side by side.
If Western nations admit Sharia, then they are admitting to a state of
inequality under the law. And that will be Islam's greatest triumph over
the freedom of the individual and the equality of man.
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