How Obama Embraces Islam's Sharia Agenda

A Creed for the Poor and Disadvantaged

Andrew C McCarthy

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781594035586
• eBook ISBN: 9781594035593
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While Americans focus on terrorism, a more insidious Islamist threat to our way of life lurks. It is the agenda of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system. The global Islamist movement aims, in the words of the international Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy the West by sabotaging it from within. Its principal strategy is not mass-murder but the exploitation of Western freedoms and the insinuation of sharia principles into Western legal systems. Because those principles are hostile to our core liberties - indeed, hostile even to the bedrock premise that people are free to govern themselves as they see fit - sharia’s advance gradually undermines our culture.The sharia agenda has found a friend in the Obama administration, which has embraced its vanguard, including the Brotherhood and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. President Obama is actively abetting the Islamist platform: promoting sharia in his foreign policy, easing enforcement of laws that stop Islamic “charities†from diverting funds to jihadist terror, and even sponsoring a United Nations resolution that - under the guise of insulating Islam from criticism - would stifle First Amendment rights.

Just a few months into his presidency, before decreeing “A New Beginning” in the relationship between Islam and the West, Barack Obama took pains to choose just the right site for the occasion of his auspicious speech. He picked al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Islam is beholden neither to synods nor to any formal ecclesiastical hierarchy. This ancient seat of Sunni scholarship is thus as close as it gets to a Muslim Vatican for Sunnis, vastly the majority sect among the creed’s 1.4 billion adherents worldwide. Given that Islam also abides no metaphorical wall of separation between the spiritual and secular realms, it is unsurprising that al-Azhar’s scholastic specialty is sharia. In Conrad Black’s recent and apt description, sharia is Islam’s “totalitarian legal system” for organizing society, “directed by clerics and going far beyond what even the most pious and fervent Westerner would consider the province of religion.”

Translated as “the path,” sharia is the corpus of Allah’s law, prescribing a comprehensive legal and political framework. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, Black is correct that it would be a mistake to think of it as a “religious” code in the Western sense. It would control every aspect of life – from the sacred to the mundane, from veneration of the divine to worldly politics, economics, military operations, social relations, familial obligations, inheritance, and even gritty details of personal hygiene.

It is sharia, not terrorism, that must be our line of demarcation, dividing radical Islam (or, as it is variously known, “Islamism” or “political Islam”) from moderate Islam. That is the thesis of a recent study called Shariah: The Threat to America – An Exercise in Competitive Analysis. I am one of the study’s several authors. The group – featuring a wealth of national security experience drawn from the spheres of intelligence, law enforcement, the military, academe, and journalism – dubbed itself “Team B-II.”

The name is an homage to the original “Team B.” More than a generation ago, that array of skeptics took issue with détente – the regnant early ’70s view that the world was plenty big enough for both sides of the Iron Curtain to coexist and even cooperate in countless areas of mutual interest. That Team B profoundly influenced a certain California governor who would go on, as president, to defeat the Evil Empire and win the Cold War. Its conclusion was straightforward yet, at the time, bracing: The Soviet Union was wedded to a totalitarian ideology, Communism, that sought global hegemony and would relentlessly work – by means violent and nonviolent – to secure the defeat of the United States and its allies in order to obtain it.

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It is sharia, not terrorism, that must be our line of demarcation, dividing radical Islam from moderate Islam.

Team B-II analogously concludes that there is today a global Islamist movement just as determined as were the Soviets to achieve worldwide dominion and as fully committed to use all means at its disposal – not just terrorism, not by a long shot – to destroy America and the West. By myopically focusing on jihadist violence, today’s equivalents of the détente solons repeat their predecessors’ perilous minimization of the threat to our way of life.

Preponderant in what Angelo Codevilla calls the “ruling class” (opinion elites in government, the academe, and the media), these purveyors of conventional wisdom insist that we need only concern ourselves with a fringe handful of “violent extremists.” (It is no longer de rigueur to call them “jihadists” or even “terrorists” – since “terror” is inconveniently invoked in Islamic scripture, its mention in this Orwellian construct is deemed defamatory of Muslims.) The exertions of these said extremists have nothing to do with Islam. Indeed, the story goes, they constitute “un-Islamic activity” simply by dint of their being violent. Better to see their “root causes” as poverty, Western imperialism, cartoons, Guantanamo Bay, Israel, Abu Ghraib, or whatever hobby horse strikes bien-pensant fancy that particular week – it being a boon for progressives to cast their every bête noire as a catalyst of terror.

Team B-II surmises that this narrative is not only wrong but dangerously so. It is wrong because violent jihadists are actually catalyzed by an interpretation of Islam that, however heinous it may seem to us in the West, is entirely mainstream, firmly rooted in Muslim scripture, and favored by influential Islamic commentators, institutions, and academic centers –...

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