Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (54 page)

In the meantime, democracy may impose its own de facto religious test, where the Constitution and the several states abolished one. No successful U.S. presidential candidate need swear on anything but the Constitution, but during campaigns for the highest office, religion remains, for some, a powerful factor.

Efforts to malign candidates through imputed associations with Islam would seem, as in the cases of Ellison and Obama, to focus exclusively on Democratic contenders for office. But that impression could not be further from the truth. Both parties have in fact been targeted, including two Republican governors who have dared to support their Muslim constituents as citizens and believers.
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Governor
Rick Perry of Texas has been attacked for maintaining a productive friendship since 2000 with the
Aga Khan, the progressive leader of one Ismaili
Shi‘i Muslim sect. Numbering twenty million worldwide, this group includes many U.S. citizens. The Aga Khan’s relationship with Governor Perry has
resulted in his funding the “Muslim Histories and Cultures Project,” which has trained Texas high school teachers at the University of Texas at Austin to implement new nonsectarian methods for teaching their students about the Islamic world.
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Another arrangement, in 2009, between the Aga Khan and Governor Perry provided for more and better cooperation in the “fields of education, health sciences, natural disaster preparedness and recovery, culture and environment.”
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In addition, Governor Perry has been credited with supporting the passage in 2003 of the Texas Halal Law (HB-470), which regulates the accurate labeling of ritually slaughtered meat for Muslim consumers. (In practice, it does what regulated kosher designations of meat and other products already accomplish for the nation’s Jewish religious minority.) Right-wing Web sites labeled the governor of Texas “a Muslim enabler” and a supporter of Sharia, or Islamic, law.
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Both accusations would likely have made the Republican vulnerable to the conservative extreme of his own base had he not suspended his run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Republican governor
Chris Christie of New Jersey also found himself the object of serious criticism from within his own party when he nominated the American Muslim lawyer
Sohail Mohammed to the state supreme court in the spring of 2011. While in practice, Christie’s appointee had represented Muslims “detained by the FBI” after 9/11. Christie defended Mohammed’s work, saying that he had “played an integral role” in “creating trust between the Islamic community and law enforcement.” After he was sworn in to the office on July 26, 2011, the Muslim jurist was falsely accused of links to terrorism and of supporting
Sharia law rather than state or federal statutes. Governor Christie responded bluntly, “This Shariah law business is crap. It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
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In contrast, other Republicans, including
Michele Bachmann and
Newt Gingrich during their bids for the 2012 presidential nomination, have supported the notion that Islamic law is the new great threat to the nation.
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Indeed, Gingrich declared that only an American Muslim candidate who “denounced” Sharia law could ever win his support for the presidency.
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In taking this stand, these politicians expressed little understanding of Islamic law, having been briefed by the same small cadre of interconnected anti-Muslim groups.
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But even some who support the anti-Sharia cause allow that “for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real. Even
its leaders concede that American Muslims are not coalescing en masse to advance Islamic law.”
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When anti-Islamic attacks against Congressman Ellison and President Obama failed, key components of the conspiracy theory directed against them were expanded to sow fear and undermine the civil rights and citizenship of all American Muslims. Those committed to resisting
Sharia law espouse a view of American identity that, contrary to the founding discourse, is exclusively Judeo-Christian or even exclusively Christian, denying the legitimacy of American Muslim citizenship and political rights. According to Islamic legal expert
Anver Emon, “more than any particular Muslim man or woman,” for these anti-Muslim activists Sharia “represents the enemy within, the terror threat.”
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Those American Muslims who might follow aspects of Sharia law—and these applications vary widely among believers—do so in their daily prayers, precepts for marriage, divorce, wills, and international commercial transactions. But these commitments do not remotely amount to a collective effort to seize political power in the United States and impose Sharia law on all its citizens. Nevertheless, in seventeen states, laws or amendments to state constitutions now target Sharia law and/or “foreign law” as illegal.
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As reporters have discovered, this “movement” did not begin as a spontaneous, grassroots political priority; it was manufactured and dispersed by a handful of activists.
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In 2006, anti-Muslim activist
David Yerushalmi created the
Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), a nonprofit that denounces Sharia law. His “expertise” in Islamic law is not based on any formal academic training. In fact, Yerushalmi has been denounced by the Jewish civil rights organization the Anti-Defamation League as well as by the U.S. Catholic bishops for his bigoted views of Muslims and African Americans.
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He is the author of the model for many of these anti-Sharia bills, which in some instances repeat the wording of his legislative template exactly.
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In 2009, with the help of Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the conservative
Center for Security Policy, Yerushalmi funneled many of his anti-Sharia ideas through the
Tea Party movement. Not surprisingly, Gaffney had once promoted the idea that President
Obama “might secretly be Muslim.” The Gaffney-Yerushalmi connection helps explain how Republican legislatures and primary candidates were briefed to adopt a position on a subject about which they knew nothing of substance. For this service, Yerushalmi received $153,000 in consulting fees from the Center for Security Policy.
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Yerushalmi also served as legal counsel for the 2010 report
Shariah: The Threat to America
, a manifesto promoted by Gaffney’s right-wing Center for Security Policy.
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Running to over two hundred pages, the report was produced by a team headed by two retired generals, William G. “Jerry” Boykin and
Harry Edward Soyster. After 9/11, Boykin, then a senior Pentagon official, “described the fight against terrorism as a Christian battle against Satan.” President George W. Bush publicly rebuked Boykin for that statement, affirming that the United States was not at war “with Islam but with violent fanatics.” After Boykin’s retirement in 2007, he became a speaker popular among extreme conservative Christians. Even before helping to author the report on Sharia, he stated that Islam “should not be protected under the First Amendment.” In 2012, Boykin’s anti-Muslim views resulted in West Point’s withdrawal of an invitation for him to address cadets at a prayer breakfast. Speaking anonymously, one cadet noted that the invitation had at first been extended to Boykin despite his anti-Islamic remarks: “I know Muslim cadets here, and they are great, outstanding citizens, and this ex-general is saying they shouldn’t enjoy the same rights.”
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The Center for Security Policy report describes Sharia as “a serious threat” to the United States, while simultaneously admitting that “there may not be a single ‘true’ Islam” practiced by over one billion Muslims worldwide.
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Neither does the manifesto deny the claims of “hopeful pundits” who may be “correct in claiming that shariah adherent Islam is not the preponderant Muslim ideology” in the United States.
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It does, however, propose that all Muslims are liars,
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an assertion based on the deliberate misinterpretation of the term
taqiyya
, which the authors translate as “lying,” but which is better known in Islamic history as “
dissimulation,” or concealment of one’s religious convictions, when threatened with “danger or death.” In very few instances have members of the Sunni Muslim majority employed this tactic, though dissimulation has historically served the
Shi‘i minority, as well as Sufi mystics threatened with persecution by fellow believers. It was in any case never conceived as a way to mislead non-Muslims, nor to have Muslims apply it as such.
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Both Gaffney and Yerushalmi, the latter the center’s
self-styled Islamic legal expert, have been designated as members of “the anti-Muslim inner circle” identified in 2011 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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That all American Muslim citizens who adhere to Sharia are necessarily disloyal and threatening to the U.S. government and its Constitution is a claim carefully weighed and dismissed by scholars of Islamic law, such as Andrew March. In his 2009 book
Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
, he asserts that a Muslim “who accepts the security of a non-Muslim state finds himself with a very strict set of duties toward that state, duties that can be argued to fulfill liberal demands of civic loyalty, including a duty to avoid harming or betraying (even during a legitimate war against that state).”
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As the scholar of law and ethics
Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, Muslims are not the only group in America routinely thought treacherous because of the legalism of their faith: “Muslims, like Jews, are always accused of having a double loyalty, and both are seen to submit themselves to a double set of legal requirements—religious law somehow making them bad subjects of civil law.”
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The legitimate question is not whether Islam or Sharia is compatible with democracy, but whether American democratic institutions truly support the religious and legal equality of Muslim citizens, as they claim to do.
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The grounds upon which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit struck down the legality of Oklahoma’s “Save Our State” anti-Sharia constitutional amendment in January 2012 remain instructive. As approved by a majority of voters, the amendment read, in part, that “the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia law.” The suit brought by a single American Muslim from Oklahoma was joined by representatives of Islamic, Jewish, Baptist, and secular interest groups such as the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the Islamic Law Committee, the American Jewish Committee, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Anti-Defamation League, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, Interfaith Alliance, and the Union for Reform Judaism.
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The claimant argued that the law had the effect of “stigmatizing him and others who practice the Islamic faith, inhibiting the practice of Islam, disabling a court from probating his last will and testament (which contains references to Sharia law), limiting the relief Muslims can obtain from Oklahoma state courts, and fostering excessive entanglements between government and religion.” Ultimately, the court of
appeals found that the amendment was illegal for “singling out his religion for negative treatment” in violation of “both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment” of the Constitution.
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In response to this precedent, many state legislative attempts to ban Sharia have been altered to regulate only “foreign law,” though the objection to Islamic law remains implicit.
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Dovetailing with the anti-Sharia movement was a slew of attempts to attack, threaten, deface, oppose, or even ban the building of mosques at thirty sites throughout the country in 2010. There have been more since.
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Such opposition is also not new in the United States.
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But in 2010 sentiments coalesced to resist the Park 51 project in New York City, later known as the
Cordoba House Initiative, which had been planned, according to Imam
Feisal Abdul Rauf, as a “multifaith worship space, including a dedicated Islamic prayer space (a mosque), in a building that architecturally would be thoroughly American.”
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Opponents of Cordoba House dubbed the project, inaccurately, “the Ground Zero mosque,” even though the structure is two and a half blocks away from the site of the 9/11 attacks and not visible from there.
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The reference to Cordoba, while intended to recall a time when Muslims, Christians, and Jews peacefully coexisted in eighth-century Spain, unfortunately also provided grist for critics who pointed out that this was a period of Islamic rule, when Christians and Jews, though allowed to worship freely, did not enjoy equality. Opponents of the mosque thus charged it with Islamic triumphalism, reminiscent of the appropriation of Spanish churches for Muslim worship. In fact, under the medieval Muslim rule only half of the original cathedral was taken over and turned into a mosque, “leaving the other half free for Christian use—an unmistakable symbol of confessional tolerance.”
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Eventually, the Muslims purchased the land under the structure that came to be known as La Mezquita from the Christians resident there. But in any case, the custom of taking over houses of worship was not particular to Muslims; Christian conquerors commonly built their churches on the ruins of pagan or Jewish sites, the latter an especially common practice in Christian Spain. It is important to remember that the space for the proposed mosque in New York City was already the property of an American Muslim businessman—and that the two extant local mosques were unable to accommodate all worshippers.
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