Why Does Reuel Marc Gerecht Defend Sharia?

[Spengler]

Why Does Reuel Marc Gerecht Defend Sharia? on the Spengler Blog


by David P. Goldman


The former CIA agent turned pundit, Reuel Marc Gerecht, offers a rambling defense of Sharia (sort of) in the New Republic website. He doesn't like what his conservative colleagues say about Sharia (which he keeps calling "The Holy Law"), but he doesn't say what it is. Kant said something about one man milking a he-goat while another held a sieve. I don't want to think about what Gerecht might be milking.

His conclusion:

Contrary to what one regularly reads on conservative websites, we are not yet losing this war. Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon and the determined proselytizing of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and among Muslim immigrants in the West are efforts to turn back the tide. But modernity is relentless. The traumatic Westernization of Islam continues. That  Westernization led to the Islamic revolution in Iran and to Osama bin Laden, but it also leads, even more powerfully, to a world where Muslims—especially Muslim women—aspire to a more prosperous and democratic way of life. We have reasons to hope that Islam’s passage will be less bloody than our own, though we should prepare, as Gingrich constantly and wisely warns us, for its being worse.

But we shouldn’t see enemies where they are not. The Holy Law is, as it’s always been, what Muslims make of it. In the titanic struggle within Islam between those who fear modernity and those who embrace it, we would do well not to make the clergy our foes. They will go, as they always have done, where the majority of Muslims take them. Like Ayatollah Khomeini before him, bin Laden once thought that most Muslims would rise up to defend his cause. Both gentlemen were wrong. Westerners and most Muslims may not (yet) share with the same intensity and priority that many values, but we share enough to provide considerable hope that the “clash of civilizations” will end, as Grand Ayatollah Sistani no doubt wants it to, in a suspicious, at times tense, but peaceful and prosperous co-existence.

He objects in particular to Newt Gingrich and his warning about sharia:

....we still ought to be concerned when prominent American conservatives—and here I’m thinking first and foremost of Newt Gingrich—blur the line between militant Muslims and the everyday faithful. When Gingrich, whom I’ve long admired and had the pleasure of working with, gave a much-noted speech at the American Enterprise Institute in which he stated, “I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it. … I think it’s that straightforward and that real,” I could only say in response, “String Theory is dangerous”: Gingrich was looking for an explanation for the Islamic terrorist threat, but, like many on the right, looking in the wrong places. Neatly tying it all together, Gingrich and others have alighted upon the Muslim Holy Law, the Sharia, as the source of all that bedevils the Middle East, and us.

But what is Sharia, and what distinguishes it from Jewish Halakha, or English Common Law, or Church Canon Law?

One only has to listen to what Muslim legal scholars have to say about Sharia to make clear why it is incompatible with what we might call society founded on covenant, a concept that embraces both Jewish law and the Social Contract theory of the Enlightenment--that is, the sort of society in which democracy has a chance to flourish.

I reviewed Islamic jurisprudence (including what American Muslim legal scholars say on the topic) recently with regard to the issue of wife beating in a recent Spengler essay:

More than the Koran's sanction of wife-beating, the legal grounds on which the Koran sanctions it reveals an impassable gulf between Islamic and Western law. The sovereign grants inalienable rights to every individual in Western society, of which protection from violence is foremost. Every individual stands in direct relation to the state, which wields a monopoly of violence. Islam's legal system is radically different: the father is a "governor" or "administrator" of the family, that is, a little sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife and children. That is the self-understanding of modern Islam spelled out by Muslim-American scholars - and it is incompatible with the Western concept of human rights.

There it is: a bright line that divides Islamic from Western law.  As I explained,

Decisive in the above analysis of Surah 4:32[which establishes the legal basis for wife-beating in Islam] is the analogy between the husband and the head of a political subdivision or organization. The state in traditional society devolves its authority to the cells from which it is composed, starting with the family, which is a state in miniature, whose patriarch is a "governor" or "administrator". Traditional society is organized like a nested set of Russian

dolls: the clan is the family writ large, the tribe is an extension of the clan, the state is an alliance of the tribes, and the relationship of citizen and sovereign is reproduced at each level.

That is why traditional society is incompatible organically with the first principal of law in modern liberal democracy, namely that the state wields the monopoly of violence. Sharia in principle cannot be adapted to the laws of modern democratic states, for it is founded on the deeply-ingrained notion that the family is the state in miniature and that the head of family may employ violent compulsion just as does the state.

In other words, wife-beating (and by extension honor killings and so forth) derive from fundamental legal principles in Muslim, the pillars upon which Sharia stands. They are not leftovers of traditional society that can be jettisoned in an updated version. Remove them, and there is no reason for Sharia to exist in the first place.

What on earth is Gerecht talking about? Without addressing how Muslims understand Sharia, this sort of discussion becomes ill-informed opinion-mongering.

[Michael]

We, in the West, have come a long way in a very short period of time.

Here in Scotland, the heritable jurisdiction of clan chiefs and feudal superiors was only abolished in 1746, by the Heritable Jurisdictions Act ((20 Geo 2 c 43).

Elsewhere in Europe, it was the French Revolution and the armies of Napoleon that swept away the remains of heritable jurisdictions, by giving a code of laws to a continent and restoring the concept of citizenship to civilization, with each citizen standing in an immediate relationship to the state, without intermediary.

[Spengler]

Wife-beating was sanctioned under English Common Law until the early modern period.

From what I can determined, Jewish law forbade wife-beating from antiquity onwards, and in the most emphatic terms. This survey of the ancient and medieval halakhic literature summarizes the matter:

http://www.beki.org/domestic.html

The sine qua non of covenental as opposed to pagan society, I think, is that every individual stands in direct relation to God, and that the dignity of the human person as an imago dei is expressed in laws that protect the individual from harm and humiliation.

[Michael]

Wife-beating was sanctioned under English Common Law until the early modern period.

From what I can determined, Jewish law forbade wife-beating from antiquity onwards, and in the most emphatic terms. This survey of the ancient and medieval halakhic literature summarizes the matter:

http://www.beki.org/domestic.html

The sine qua non of covenental as opposed to pagan society, I think, is that every individual stands in direct relation to God, and that the dignity of the human person as an imago dei is expressed in laws that protect the individual from harm and humiliation.

In Sotland, an assult by a husband on his wife has always been an article of aggravation; this, no doubt, derives from a patriarchal notion of the husband as her natural protector, but so it is; also,it would have been seen as an affront to her kindred, with the consequent risk of breaches of the public peace, &c, particularly when the clan system was in full vigour.

[Richard Greene]

This is not the first time Spengler has commented on Gerecht:

Theological illiteracy is epidemic in the neo-conservative camp. The American Enterprise Institute's Iran expert, former US Central Intelligence Agency officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, thinks that "Islam is akin to biblical Judaism in accentuating the unnuanced, transcendent awe of God". Gerecht is ge-wrong.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HJ03Aa03.html

[Richard Greene]

The Bill O'Reilly Fallacy
Reul Gerecht
. . .
When Westerners, however well-intentioned, start suggesting that Muslim law supplies the foundation for Islamic terrorism, it immediately conveys to Muslims, even secularized Muslims, that Westerners think all Muslims are disordered, that the only route to salvation runs through a renunciation of their faith (that is, they ought to become the mirror-image of Westerners who go to church every so often. Whatever vestigial pride Muslims may have in their religious law (most Muslims aren’t particularly fastidious or knowledgeable about the Sharia, but nevertheless have an understandable historic affection for it), gets crudely pummeled by such commentators.

The blanket demonization of the Holy Law can lead one to view Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most revered Shiite thinker in the world, and one who tried desperately and selflessly to keep his country from descending into internecine savagery, as a bigot and a terrorist engine.

Now let me show you how -- in his own words -- "moderate" cleric Sistani is a CLASS A BIGOT, not to mention a terrorist engine. In his website, he lists all non-Muslims as najis, along with dogs and pigs (and urine & feces in another subsection).

http://www.sistani.org/local.php?module ... 9&pid=2863

Islamic Laws : Najis things » Kafir< Najis things » Dogs and pigs | Index | Najis things » Alcoholic liquor >


107. An infidel i.e. a person who does not believe in Allah and His Oneness, is najis. Similarly, Ghulat who believe in any of the holy twelve Imams as God, or that they are incarnations of God, and Khawarij and Nawasib who express enmity towards th e holy Imams, are also najis. And similar is the case of those who deny Prophethood, or any of the necessary laws of Islam, like, namaz and fasting, which are believed by the Muslims as a part of Islam, and which they also know as such.
As regards the people of the Book (i.e. the Jews and the Christians) who do not accept the Prophethood of Prophet Muhammad bin Abdullah (Peace be upon him and his progeny), they are commonly considered najis, but it is not improbable that they are Pak. Ho wever, it is better to avoid them.

108. The entire body of a Kafir, including his hair and nails, and all liquid substances of his body, are najis.

109. If the parents, paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of a minor child are all kafir, that child is najis, except when he is intelligent enough, and professes Islam. When, even one person from his parents or grandparents is a Muslim, the child is Pak (The details will be explained in rule 217).

110. A person about whom it is not known whether he is a Muslim or not, and if no signs exist to establish him as a Muslim, he will be considered Pak. But he will not have the privileges of a Muslim, like, he cannot marry a Muslim woman, nor can he be buried in a Muslim cemetery.

111. Any person who abuses any of the twelve holy Imams on account of enmity, is najis.

What does najis mean, exactly? Look it up in Wikipedia, but you won't get the full meaning and connotations as understood by a devout Muslim. "Najis" is actually the Farsi version of "nejis", the Arabic term of art to denote anything that is physically, ritually and spiritually unclean.

One of the greatest failings of theologically-challenged Western secularists is their anodyne use of language to describe Islam. The words that these useful idiots use never show any real understanding of Islam. We're talking about "bigots" and "bigotry", no? Take for example, the word najis/nejis.>

December 26, 2009

Is Shi'ism the Iranian Regime's Achilles' Heel?
By Andrew G. Bostom
The death of Iran's Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri at age 87 on December 20, 2009 has been followed by decidedly hagiographic post-mortems. But perhaps the most curious of these assessments, by Michael Rubin, includes a contention that "the real Achilles Heel to the Iranian regime is Shi'ism." This odd viewpoint is merely the extension of a profoundly flawed, ahistorical mindset which denies the living legacy of Shi'ite Islamic doctrine and its authentic, oppressive application in Iran, particularlysince the advent of the Safavid theocratic state at the very beginning of the 16th century.


The great Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher -- a renowned Islamophile -- believed that Shi'ism manifested greater doctrinal intolerance toward non-Muslims, compared to Sunni Islam. Goldziher observed,


On examining the legal documents, we find that the Shi'i legal position toward other faiths is much harsher and stiffer than that taken by Sunni Muslims. Their law reveals a heightened intolerance to people of other beliefs...Of the severe rule in the Qur'an (9:28) that "unbelievers are unclean", Sunni Islam has accepted an interpretation that is as good as a repeal. Shi'i law, on the other hand, has maintained the literal sense of the rule; it declares the bodily substance of the unbeliever to be ritually unclean, and lists the touching of an unbeliever among the ten things that produce najasa [najis], ritual impurity.


At the outset of the 16th century, Iran's Safavid rulers formally established Shi'a Islam as the state religion, while permitting a clerical hierarchy nearly unlimited control and influence over all aspects of public life. The profound influence of the Shi'ite clerical elite continued for almost four centuries (although it was interrupted between 1722-1795 during a period of Afghan invasion and internecine struggle), through the later Qajar period (1795-1925), as characterized by the Persianophilic scholar E.G. Browne:


The Mujtahids and Mulla are a great force in Persia and concern themselves with every department of human activity from the minutest detail of personal purification to the largest issues of politics ...



These Shi'ite clerics emphasized the notion of the ritual uncleanliness (najis) of Jews in particular, but also of Christians, Zoroastrians, and others, as the cornerstone of inter-confessional relationships toward non-Muslims. The impact of this najis conception was already apparent to European visitors to Persia during the reign of the first Safavid Shah, Ismail I (1502-1524). The Portuguese traveler Tome Pires observed (between 1512-1515), "Sheikh Ismail ... never spares the life of any Jew," while another European travelogue makes note of "the great hatred [Ismail I] bears against the Jews[.]" During the reign of Shah Tahmasp I (d. 1576), the British merchant and traveler Anthony Jenkinson (a Christian), when finally granted an audience with the Shah,


... was required to wear 'basmackes' (a kind of over-shoes), because being a giaour [infidel], it was thought he would contaminate the imperial precincts ... when he was dismissed from the Shah's presence, [Jenkinson stated] 'after me followed a man with a basanet of sand, sifting all the way that I had gone within the said palace' -- as though covering something unclean.


The writings and career of Mohammad Baqer Majlisi elucidate the imposition of Shi'ite dhimmitude in Iran. Majlisi (d. 1699), the highest institutionalized clerical officer under both Shah Sulayman (1666-1694) and Shah Husayn (1694-1722), was perhaps the most influential cleric of the Safavid Shi'ite theocracy in Persia. Indeed, for a decade at the end of the 17th century, al-Majlisi functioned as the de facto ruler of Iran -- the Ayatollah Khomeini of his era. By design, he wrote many works in Persian to disseminate key aspects of the Shi'a ethos among ordinary persons. His Persian treatise "Lightning Bolts Against the Jews," despite its title, was actually an overall guideline to anti-dhimmi regulations for all non-Muslims within the Shi'ite theocracy. In this treatise, al-Majlisi describes the standard humiliating requisites for non-Muslims living under the Shari'a -- first and foremost, the blood ransom jizya, or poll-tax, based on Koran 9:29. He then enumerates six other restrictions relating to worship, housing, dress, transportation, and weapons (specifically to render the dhimmis defenseless), before outlining the unique Shi'ite impurity or "najis" regulations. According to Al-Majlisi,


And, that they should not enter the pool while a Muslim is bathing at the public baths ... It is also incumbent upon Muslims that they should not accept from them victuals with which they had come into contact, such as distillates, which cannot be purified. If something can be purified, such as clothes, if they are dry, they can be accepted, they are clean. But if they [the dhimmis] had come into contact with those cloths in moisture they should be rinsed with water after being obtained. As for hide, or that which has been made of hide such as shoes and boots, and meat, whose religious cleanliness and lawfulness are conditional on the animal's being slaughtered [according to the Shari'a], these may not be taken from them. Similarly, liquids that have been preserved in skins, such as oils, grape syrup, [fruit] juices, ... and the like, if they have been put in skin containers or water skins, these should [also] not be accepted from them ... It would also be better if the ruler of the Muslims would establish that all infidels could not move out of their homes on days when it rains or snows because they would make Muslims impure.


The dehumanizing character of these popularized "impurity" regulations fomented recurring Muslim violence against Iran's non-Muslims -- including pogroms, forced conversions, and expropriations -- throughout the 17th through the early 20th centuries.


The so-called "Khomeini revolution," which deposed Mohammad Reza Shah, was in reality a mere return to oppressive Shi'ite theocratic rule, the predominant form of Iranian governance since 1502. Conditions for all non-Muslim religious minorities, particularly Bahá'ís and Jews, rapidly deteriorated. Historian David Littman recounts the Jews' immediate plight:


In the months preceding the Shah's departure on 16 January 1979, the religious minorities ... were already beginning to feel insecure ... Twenty thousand Jews left the country before the triumphant return of the Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 February ... On 16 March, the honorary president of the Iranian Jewish community, Habib Elghanian, a wealthy businessman, was arrested and charged by an Islamic revolutionary tribunal with "corruption" and "contacts with Israel and Zionism"; he was shot on 8 May.


The writings and speeches of the most influential religious ideologues of this restored Shi'ite theocracy -- including Khomeini himself -- make apparent their seamless connection to the oppressive doctrines of their forbears in the Safavid dynasty. Most notably, the conception of najis, or ritual uncleanliness of the non-Muslim, has been reaffirmed. Ayatollah Khomeini stated explicitly, "Non-Muslims of any religion or creed are najis." Khomeini elaborated his views on najis and non-Muslims as follows:



Eleven things are unclean: urine, excrement, sperm, blood, a dog, a pig, bones, a non-Muslim man and woman [emphasis added], wine, beer, perspiration of a camel that eats filth ... The whole body of a non-Muslim is unclean, even his hair, his nails, and all the secretions of his body ... A child below the age of puberty is unclean if his parents and grandparents are not Muslims; but if he has a Muslim for a forebear, then he is clean ... The body, saliva, nasal secretions, and perspiration of a non-Muslim man or woman who converts to Islam automatically become pure. As for the garments, if they were in contact with the sweat of the body before conversion, they will remain unclean ...


Khomeini's close ally, the late, much-lionized Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, further indicated that a non-Muslim (kafir's) impurity is "a political order from Islam and must be adhered to by the followers of Islam, and the goal [is] to promote general hatred toward those who are outside Muslim circles." This "hatred" was to assure that Muslims would not succumb to corrupt -- i.e., non-Islamic -- thoughts. Montazeri's Shi'ite Islamic Weltanschauung was articulated in his four-volume treatise on the "Vilayat al-Faqih" [Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists], a key rationale for the post-1979 Iranian Shi'ite theocracy. These views -- openly antithetical to Western conceptions of individual liberty, religious freedom, and democracy -- were aptly summarized by Montazeri's student, Iranian sociology professor Mahmood Davari, in 2005:


According to Montazeri, Islamic rule differs from Western democracy in two matters. While the people in a democratic system are supposedly free to elect any person as their ruler, in a Shi'i society Muslims may not choose any other ruler except a just faqih. In a democratic society, people are free to legislate any law according to their collective wishes, whereas in an Islamic regime the legislation must be in accord with Islamic laws and ordinances. Therefore, according to Montazeri, Islamic rule is essentially different from democracy in the West.


The practical consequences of Montazari's bigoted Shi'ite Islamic authoritarianism -- which Michael Rubin ignores -- have been highlighted by Iranian studies professor Jamsheed Choksy. In an NRO essay ("Religious Cleansing in Iran") written with Nina Shea (published July 22, 2009), Choksy noted,


Iran's constitution requires that laws and regulations be based on Islamic criteria, which mandate inferior status for three non-Muslim faiths, while withholding all rights and protections from all other faiths. Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian (specifically, Assyrian and Armenian) live in a modern version of dhimmi status - the ... subjugated condition of "people of the Book" dating back to medieval times. While these three groups are allotted seats in the legislative assembly (a total of five out of 290 seats), they are barred from seeking high public office in any of the three branches of government. ...



Non-Muslim communities collectively have diminished to no more than 2 percent of Iran's 71 million people. Forty years ago, under the Shah, a visitor would have seen a relatively tolerant society. Iran now appears to be in the final stages of religious cleansing. Pervasive discrimination, intimidation, and harassment have prompted non-Muslims to flee in disproportionately high numbers.


Choksy concluded this past July with a reminder especially apposite for those who share Rubin's views:


Iran's political dissidents are defended by the West. Its diverse non-Muslim minorities ask why they've been forgotten.


And following Montazeri's death, Choksy made this sobering observation:


[T]he religious minorities in Iran see little theological difference and only a marginal pragmatism among the various Shiite views. Montazeri's opinion was characterized by one Iranian Christian clergyman as "...rubbing salt into our wounds." Ultimately, Montazeri's tolerance of differences, especially religious ones, was far from acceptance.

Finally, it would behoove Michael Rubin and his ilk -- those ostensibly promoting "authentic, Montazeri-stylized Shi'ism" -- to carefully re-examine Iran's history under Shi'ite Islam, and then ponder these sagacious words written a decade ago by the secular Iranian historian Reza Afshari:

... Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran has presented an almost perfect case. Who is more culturally and religiously authentic than the Ayatollah's? Who is more credible to say what relevance Shiite culture has or does not have for the major issues of our time? The issue is not Islam as a private faith of individuals. It is about what state officials claiming Islamic authority might have to say about the state's treatment of citizens. Islamic cultural relativism in human rights discourse addresses Islamic cultural preferences for the articulation of public policies within the contemporary state. In Iran, liberal Muslims or any other new interpreters of Islam did not come to power. When and if they do, we will have their record to examine. What we have from liberal Muslims today are only ideological claims punctuated by expressed good intentions. A sector of the traditional custodians of religion, the ulema, politicizing Islam did come to power; therefore it is logical to assume what we faced in the 1980s and 1990s was the result of Shiite Islam (at least an authentic version of it) injecting itself into the politics of a contemporary state. They created a record of what the `culturally authentic rulers did. The Western cultural relativists deserve to know the details of that record.

The problem with the Neocons is they use their liberal Judeo-Christian belief system to process Islam, instead of viewing Islam as ME Muslim clerics. Thinking by analogy when you're dealing with a value system that is completely opposite of the Judeo-Christian (which Islam is on so many issues -- treatment of women & wifebeating being one of many) one is very dangerous.

[cassowary]

Wife-beating was sanctioned under English Common Law until the early modern period.

From what I can determined, Jewish law forbade wife-beating from antiquity onwards, and in the most emphatic terms. This survey of the ancient and medieval halakhic literature summarizes the matter:

http://www.beki.org/domestic.html

The sine qua non of covenental as opposed to pagan society, I think, is that every individual stands in direct relation to God, and that the dignity of the human person as an imago dei is expressed in laws that protect the individual from harm and humiliation.

The simple way of explaining this is to say that wife beating is sanctioned in the Koran but not in the Old or New Testament. So while English law, being man made, can change, you can't change Islamic law without repudiating the Koran. To repudiate the Koran, you have to abandon Islam itself. That is the quandary.