You can’t believe Muhammad is a prophet and that his commands are voluntary.
This spring, Indiana’s Republican Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith called Islam “a demonic death cult” and said Americans needed “permission to hate again.” The phrasing, at least as excerpted, was unfortunate, and the backlash has been as expected. Several Muslim advocacy groups have called Beckwith’s comments “dangerous” and “hateful.”
But it is worth asking what he was reaching for, because the impulse beneath the words is not imaginary or shameful. Americans sense, correctly, that some systems in the world aspire to unmake the freedoms that protect them and their children, and that a free people is entitled to say so plainly and to resist.
Can a legal system that claims final authority over conscience, speech, and the courtroom be welcomed into a constitutional republic and trusted to remain in submission to the laws of the land? The question deserves more than a sound bite — and this week it received a serious attempt at an answer.
Writing in part in response to A. S. Ibrahim’s new book Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom, Mustafa Akyol — a Cato Institute senior fellow, former New York Times columnist, and perhaps the most articulate Muslim advocate of reconciling Islam with Western liberty — argued that it can. He argues that sharia, rightly understood, need be no more than a voluntary devotion, a way of living toward God that does no harm to any unwilling neighbor.
It is a gracious vision. It is also a familiar one. The same hope reaches us from academic panels, interfaith gatherings, and editorial pages — wherever thoughtful people wish that sharia could be received as a private faith rather than a public law binding even upon bystanders. The difficulty is that what Akyol wishes sharia to be is not what it is.
The ambiguity is not academic. At an open house at a Plano, Texas mosque this July, an outreach director reassured visitors: “Sharia is already here” — by which he meant feeding neighbors, caring for parents, giving to the poor. On that definition, sharia is simply devout private life, and no one need fear it.
Outside the same event stood an Iranian-born Christian who had lived under the other sharia. He did not hate Muslims, he said. He wanted Americans to understand that Islam “becomes offensive the minute it takes power” — when the blasphemy and apostasy laws begin. One word, two meanings. The whole question is which one governs when the choice is no longer voluntary.
Sharia is the meticulous legal implementation of Muhammad’s teaching, example, and indeed his explicit plan for the ordering of society. All of society, composed of those who believe his message and those who do not.
There can be nothing voluntary about certain aspects of adherence to sharia. Yes, one can choose whether to enter Islam (although the sole alternative is sometimes death), but once in Islam, one may never leave, on penalty of death. One may proclaim aloud that Jesus is not God (can you imagine a greater insult?), but one may not state publicly that Muhammad was a false prophet — again, on penalty of death.