What Do You Mean By "Sharia Law"?

Western liberals surely hate racism, except when they need it to scare up some votes.

For months, U.S. Democrats (as well as their sycophantic enablers in the entertainment and political media industries) have taken to every available platform with ominous warnings of a Republican plan to reshape democracy in Mussolini’s image. Project 2025, according to the Skye Perryman-founded project Democracy Foward, represents “a ruthless plan to undermine the quality of life of millions of Americans…and prioritize special interests and ideological extremism over people.” And the Project 2025 policy agenda certainly includes proposals that would alarm anyone who’s been in a deep coma since before the Bush 2 Administration and just woke up.

However, it is doubtful that anything in this 900-page document will leap out to the average voter as some harbinger of an immediate fascist takeover of America. That hasn’t stopped Democrats from using it as paranoiac leverage to whip up their base, though – a base that’s becoming increasingly sheepish, if recent polling is any indication – in the face of a sinking reality that President Biden’s cognitive state is, much like the “world’s oldest democracy” he leads, sliding into terminal senescence.

Which presumably is how Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo (whose spirited enunciation of the c-word on-camera recently earned him an Oscar nomination) recently found himself boosting the message on Twitter with a dire pronouncement that “Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism.” His message would have landed quite neatly if he had ended it there.

But, given the liberal tendency for rhetorical self-immolation, of course he didn’t end it there.

“It is the Sharia Law of the ‘Christian’ crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive, and kindly teachings,” Ruffalo continued. “Don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s extremist and perverse ideology. Trump is bringing it to all our lives: abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of education, and equality between the races and genders—GONE. Forced birth and forced religion. Trump’s American Taliban.”

Using Islam as a shorthand to invoke fear of a reactionary social agenda is so commonplace by now, and it has been for so long, that it would probably go unnoticed were it not for the rather un-subtle shift in its intended target: American conservatism. It’s the sort of role reversal that liberals seem a bit too enamored with these days—we’re the ones who are really tough on our enemies, and those Republicans just resemble them more and more all the time, don’t they? 

Under this rhetorical construction, all stops must be pulled out to stop this descent into extremism, yet, rather conveniently for Democrats, stops being pulled out begin and end at the ballot box.

I’m a relatively new convert to Islam, and I’ve certainly had my struggles with everything from regular prayer, to my sexual identity, and beyond. While it hasn’t been easy to reconcile my attitudes, habits, desires, and such with my Muslim faith, I can’t attribute that to any intolerance I’ve experienced within the ummah. In fact, my Muslim brothers and sisters have been extremely welcoming, and they check in with me regularly about my general well-being and that of my family, without judgment (except, perhaps, whether I’m eating enough, due to my polite but frequent declining of offers to buy me snacks after prayer service). So remarks like Ruffalo’s are bound to stand out to someone like me—possibly more acutely than they might to someone who has endured Islamophobia all their lives, and therefore, become painfully inured to it.

But even prior to my conversion* in 2022, and well before the immediate post-9/11 period began roughly a quarter-century ago, I knew about the concept of Sharia, and I also knew about the diversity of its adherents around the world, just by growing up in neighbourhoods as diverse as Malton and Rexdale, Ontario. Deploying the spectre of “Sharia Law” as a scare tactic, among both conservatives and liberals, has always struck me as one of the most vulgar forms of racism and ignorance. One aimed at an entire quarter of the human population who find the Qibla before they kneel in prayer, and for whom Sharia is not just “law”, but a living set of practices.

Ever since the Taliban and al-Qaeda replaced the USSR as the Civilized West’s existential enemy in 2001, the beliefs of Muslim extremists have served as a proxy for Islam itself. Samuel P. Huntington’s so-called “Clash of Civilizations” has gripped pundits and intellectuals, and anyone who was at least old enough at the time to watch primetime TV with their parents saw Alexander Siddig’s star rise, as both the overt jihadist fanatic and the sleeper agent tropes crowded out the available villain slots, in fiction as in reality.

These stereotypes, of course, served the vital function of legitimating the U.S. war machine and its horrific misdeeds. Rather than Nazis sending minorities to concentration camps and crematoriums, and Soviets sending political dissidents to freeze to death in northern gulags, the death-loving Wahabbist beheading young men and sending off young women to join the concubinage of some crazed mullah loomed large in the collective Western imagination. Bombs and black sites soon followed.

But even as political viewpoints began to shift in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial disaster and fatigue with endless war grew, and the West began looking inward to find its true villains, vestiges of that Bush-era Islamophobia remain etched indelibly in the Western mind. Ruffalo himself is borrowing from an old script. Long after red states and municipalities exhausted their political capital (and voters’ patience) with empty ballot measures and legislation to “ban Sharia Law,” Democratic politicians still managed to eke out some mileage with the charade. For example, former Democratic Congressional representative Alan Grayson attacked his Republican opponent Daniel Webster in a 2010 campaign ad with the label “Taliban Daniel Webster,” likening Webster’s proposals to ban divorce and abortion to religious fanaticism in countries like Iran.

This, despite the fact that divorce and abortion in Iran, while certainly facing many more restrictions than within the US, are not strictly illegal.

And herein lies the larger problem: when people refer to “Sharia Law” in Western politics, not only is it a sign of abject desperation, a last-ditch bid to avoid a catastrophic electoral loss we all know is coming, it’s also a tell that the doomsayer invoking it doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

To begin with, “Sharia Law,” or simply Sharia (شَرِيعَة) is itself a body of rules and jurisprudence which governs broad and, in fact, mostly mundane aspects of life. The strictest and most well-defined of those rules generally govern worship, sacred times and places, and purifying oneself, while other, more loosely defined rules concern social relations. Sharia covers everything from which hand washes which first, to which foods are permitted to be eaten, to the number of daily prayers, to permitted sexual practices, some much more strictly interpreted than others within the four madhhab, or schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

All of this might sound overbearing and constricting to those of us in the West who value individual freedom over and above every other ideal or principle. But our understanding of freedom may not be the only understanding of that ideal, nor must it always and exclusively be thought of as the highest good for all people everywhere, at all times. This line of thinking betrays the historical tendency to believe in the white man’s burden to tame and civilize the more savage races and nations. 

Yes, there are rules under Sharia which many in the secular West consider oppressive, such as those governing the modesty of dress, and the fact that same-sex marriage is not recognized. But this paradigm isn’t at all unfamiliar to even the most strict secularists in the West. In fact, most people living in the Western world carry out their social and personal affairs under laws and customs whose origins are mostly ecclesiastical.

I don’t say this to make Sharia sound innocuous, or more palatable to those who take exception to the rules they can’t reconcile with their personal beliefs. But consider that, in states like California, committing adultery within a marriage can affect spousal support payments, the division of assets, and even child custody. Adultery even remains a felony in several states. So it’s worth asking what it is that makes adultery more worthy of social opprobrium and juridical punishment than other leading causes of divorce, such as financial irresponsibility, or saddling one’s spouse with an unfair burden of chores.

We’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t admit that many of our social, legal, and political norms — despite efforts since the Enlightenment period to splice together a Christianized West with the traditions of Classical Antiquity, along with influence from Indigenous cultures — stem from laws and traditions developed on the understanding that nations, institutions, and people are ultimately answerable to, and governed under the watchful eye of, an all-powerful God. Adultery within marriage doesn’t simply imply a breach of trust between partners, but carries the epigenetic stain of a breach of the sacred covenant which we’ve traditionally understood as having been sworn between a man, his wife, and the Almighty. 

In fact, the American trend towards secularism over the past half-century hasn’t necessarily resulted in less religiosity among the public, per se, but rather a stratification and individualization of religious practice. Many sociologists, including Georgetown professor José Casanova, cheekily refer to this trend as “supply-side” secularism. 

Knowing this, and knowing the extent to which Christian extremism in the West has contributed to repression of the LGBT community at home as well as abroad, why then does the phrase “Sharia Law” continue to function as a shorthand for religious absolutism  encroaching on the public sphere?

Well, it’s because the people who push those tropes are racist.

I hate to be simplistic, but there’s no way to make it complicated without waffling. The idea that certain elements of Project 2025 can be simply attributed to Christian extremism, and the further idea that such extremism can only be understood by audiences through an image of, say, ISIS militiamen throwing gay men from rooftops, comes from a well-studied impulse in the white Western imagination. It’s the same impulse which attributes violent, lustful, and “toxic” behaviour among males to the Black man, and avaricious, double-dealing greed in commerce to the Jew. It’s the impulse to believe that a certain set of standards governs the way white men fight, or that unchecked “authoritarianism” and the never-ending growth of the surveillance state is an unsavoury adoption of Chinese practices.

In short, it’s the belief that America (and the West, broadly) is fundamentally good. That any deviance from the core of its virtues and ideals is due to pollution by foreign and essentially malignant cultures, beliefs, and practices which are not only incompatible with American culture in the long-term, but must be excised totally before America is transformed into something unrecognizable. It’s ethnocentrism at its worst.

This, from people born in a country that had to fight a bloody war over the question of whether one man has the right to enslave another, a country that infiltrates, imprisons, and assassinates Black freedom fighters, that sends money and missiles to Israel for the purpose of conducting a genocide, and that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to demonstrate its military strength to the Soviets, is entirely too much to stomach.

Mark Ruffalo has, for several months, spoken out forcefully against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. To his credit, he is one of the first Hollywood celebrities to cut against the (near total) censorious and Islamophobic consensus within the entertainment industry. To see this kind of message coming from him in particular is all the more depressing. But Ruffalo is, like the rest of us, steeped within a chauvinist and Orientalist mindset which affords itself endless grace, but has none left over for the vaguely illusive, abstracted cultures of the people for whom he advocates.

Sharia doesn’t even prohibit abortion. Depending on which state, school, or scholar one subscribes to, it’s permissible for as few as 40 days after conception, or as many as 120 days. Homosexuality isn’t considered a “sin of the mind” in Islam, as it is with Christianity, even though the view (and potential punishment) of homosexual acts differs from school to school, and from place to place. And all that is moot for everyone else, as it’s generally accepted among the ummah that Sharia doesn’t apply to non-Muslims. It’s no secret that Muslim caliphates throughout history have mostly allowed religious minorities to conduct their religious and social affairs according to their own frameworks.

Ruffalo likely doesn’t know any of this, because he’s never had to learn. The glib cultural shorthand of “Sharia Law” is all that’s required to condense Muslim culture, customs, and ways of understanding the world into a discursive bogeyman. Anyone familiar with the chauvinism of white abolitionists in the 19th century, and white anti-apartheid advocates in the 1980s, wouldn’t be surprised by this tendency at all.

It’s unfortunate, but in the end, a mere fact of life. It isn’t as if these people can even talk about each other’s differing political stances without lapsing into fearmongering, so why would we expect they wouldn’t fall into old habits when talking about the rest of us? Why even spend all of this time and energy on so many words that have little chance of being read or understood?

Well, because the expectation of disappointment from liberal “allies” simply isn’t good enough. Christian extremism belongs to Christendom and the occidental culture within which it resides. Liberal “allies” to Palestinians—the latter of whom are much more occupied with resisting their own genocide than giving any thought to electoral politics or cultural freedoms in the United States—can’t continue to project their own cultures of violence and structural dominance onto others who have nothing to do with those things. “Sharia Law” is a bogeyman that entails whatever the speaker wants or believes. But Muslims don’t practice “Sharia Law,” which, once transliterated from Arabic, would read “Sharia Law Law.”

We subscribe to Sharia.

Sharia doesn’t call for legislating a permanent end to divorce, a ban on abortion even in the case of rape and incest, subsumption of the bureaucracy under the auspices of the Oval Office, or further dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. These are aspects of a broad policy agenda pushed by Christian reactionaries, and their goals far exceed those of America’s rhetorical antipodes like Iran and China (within which America has also backed religious and fascistic elements in order to further its own goals) .

On the off chance you are reading this, Mark Ruffalo, Project 2025 belongs to you and yours. It is entirely your mess. Stick to invoking your own culture and history, replete with more than enough bloody, repressive moments to draw from, as you try to rally your dispirited voters in a last-ditch effort to clean it up.

*My deepest apologies to those who insist on the word “revert,” but the term raises far more questions than answers among non-Muslims, so I’ll stick with “convert.”