Merriam Webster defines “religion” as “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.” Islam certainly qualifies as a religion by that definition. Religions profess to connect human beings to the divine. Islam professes to do that. At the same time, however, it is also a political system that is authoritarian, supremacist, discriminatory, expansionist, violent, and aggressive. Asma T. Uddin must be aware of that fact but ignores it entirely, instead giving the impression that Sharia is simply religious law, and opposition to Sharia is simply motivated by religious bigotry and “Islamophobia.”
In reality, Islamic law’s political aspects contradict Constitutional principles and American freedoms in numerous particulars, including its denial of the freedom of speech, the institutionalized discrimination against women, non-Muslims, and other groups, its death penalty for apostasy from Islam and for homosexual activity, and more. At a certain point there is going to have to be a national discussion about whether religious freedom grants Muslims the right to break other laws, or whether the aspects of Sharia that contradict American law are unwelcome in the United States. Asma T. Uddin and the New York Times are trying to foreclose upon that discussion by muddling the issue.
Islam has always been political. Its political aspect has always been considered intrinsic to its nature. On this, the historical record is clear. See my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS: it shows definitively, from primary source material, that everywhere Islam has gone, it has gone as a political entity, and waged war against other political entities. Asma T. Uddin and the New York Times are relying upon your ignorance of Islamic law and Islamic history to manipulate you into thinking that Sharia is benign and completely compatible with the United States’ character as a free society, even though every society where Sharia has ever been implemented has not been free. Thwart this manipulation: order The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS here.
“The Latest Attack on Islam: It’s Not a Religion,” by Asma T. Uddin, New York Times, September 26, 2018 (thanks to the Geller Report):
Religious liberty has become a particularly politicized topic in recent years, and recent months were no different. In a long-awaited June decision, the Supreme Court decided in favor of a Christian baker who refused to make a custom wedding cake for a gay couple. In July, Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced a “religious liberty task force” that critics saw as a mere cover for anti-gay discrimination. And Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s record has been scoured for evidence of what his appointment to the Supreme Court would mean for future decisions in which Christian beliefs clash with law and policy.
But when it comes to religious liberty for Americans, there’s a disturbing trend that has drawn much less attention. In recent years, state lawmakers, lawyers and influential social commentators have been making the case that Muslims are not protected by the First Amendment.
Why? Because, they argue, Islam is not a religion.
This once seemed like an absurd fringe argument. But it has gained momentum. John Bennett, a Republican state legislator in Oklahoma, said in 2014, “Islam is not even a religion; it is a political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest.” In 2015, a former assistant United States attorney, Andrew C. McCarthy, wrote in National Review that Islam “should be understood as conveying a belief system that is not merely, or even primarily, religious.” In 2016, Michael Flynn, who the next year was briefly President Trump’s national security adviser, told an ACT for America conference in Dallas that “Islam is a political ideology” that “hides behind the notion of it being a religion.” In a January 2018 news release, Neal Tapio of South Dakota, a Republican state senator who was planning to run for the United States House of Representatives, questioned whether the First Amendment applies to Muslims….
The fear is not limited to mosque cases. There have been legislative efforts in 43 states to ban the practice of Islamic religious law, or Shariah law; 24 bills were introduced in 2017 alone, according to the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. This year, Idaho introduced an anti-Shariah bill, bringing the number of measures introduced since 2010 to at least 217. Of those, 20 have been enacted.
The laws’ backers seem to see them as necessary stopgaps to protect against their imagined Muslim takeover of America. When an Idaho state representative, Eric Redman, a Republican, introduced his anti-Shariah bill in January, he said it was needed so that “foreign law” would not “defile our constitutional laws” and to “protect our state and our country.” That’s a similar sentiment to the one expressed by the conservative political activist Pamela Geller, who argued in a 2016 commentary published by Breitbart that Muslim women seeking accommodations to wear a head scarf in the workplace are part of a “Muslim effort to impose Islam on the secular marketplace.”…