In Islamic Law, Gingrich Sees a Mortal Threat to U.S.
Scott Shane, NY Times
Long before he announced his presidential run this year, Newt Gingrich had become the most prominent American politician to embrace an alarming premise: that Shariah, or Islamic law, poses a threat to the United States as grave as or graver than terrorism.
“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”
Mr. Gingrich was articulating a much-disputed thesis in vogue with some conservative thinkers but roundly rejected by many American Muslims, scholars of Islam and counterterrorism officials. The anti-Shariah theorists say that just as communism posed an ideological and moral threat to America separate from the menace of Soviet missiles, so today radical Islamists are working to impose Shariah in a “stealth jihad” that is no less dangerous than the violent jihad of Al Qaeda.
“Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Mr. Gingrich said in the speech. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.”
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/politics/in-shariah-gingrich-sees-mortal-threat-to-us.html?pagewanted=all
= new reply since forum marked as read
regardless of what you call it, there actually ARE right-wing fundamentalist "Christians" advocating for laws that they claim are based on the Bible. And sometimes they have been successful.
To me that's what makes this discussion a little weird. The same people who are trying to make an issue of "Sharia" actually want substantially the same things (based on what I think I know of Sharia, which might be wrong, and what I absolutely know about the insanity of right-wing fundamentalist "Christians"
... they just want to implement it under their own banner.
Btw, do you have a link to an English language version of exactly what is meant by "Sharia law", to you?
You have the Sharia of Creation and the Sharia applied to Muslims.
So pure water freezing at 32 degrees is a law of the Creation, the Standard Model of Physics, etc. etc.
For Sharia as applied to Muslims the vast majority of Muslim Legal Systems apply this only to Muslims. Paying the poor rate, etc. and non-Muslims pay a tax for protection by the Islamic Authority and usually have their own set of applicable laws.
In the UK for example there is English Common Law and then more and more Muslims are using Sharia to settle disputes amongst themselves.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16522447
For me living in the United States there are protections for my wife under Islamic Law that I apply to our marriage. Mostly dealing with financial protections to her if something should happen to me. Most non-Muslims obviously do this as well in many ways.
Most of it deals with contracts, marriage, giving to charity and passing on capital if one dies. So if a practicing Muslim in the U.S. wants to do those things they simply do them. They don't need to institute Sharia in the U.S. to do it. They are the ones individually accountable before God, so not only are they not worried about imposing it on other Muslims in the U.S. but it is against Sharia to impose Sharia on non-Muslims. What good does it do them? It would only be for Nationalistic purposes.
(Sorry for the lack of detail but at work and that is all I had time to write 