The Second Amendment and Islamic law

The Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Second Amendment comes just as it has been revealed that in Iraq, Islamic jihadists have been forcing the Christians remaining in the country to pay jizya -- the tax mandated in the Qur’an for non-Muslims who live under Islamic rule. And in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, the Taliban has been enforcing Islamic Sharia law by waving automatic weapons, forcing music stores to close down at the point of a gun (music is forbidden in Islamic law).

Maybe if Iraq and Afghanistan had the Second Amendment, these things wouldn’t be happening. But they are a bracing reminder of just how radically different are American republican pluralism and the Islamic law that jihadists worldwide are fighting in order to implement. In April 2008, the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Islam offered a glimpse of their perfect society, as they set down a list of measures they planned to implement in the Khyber Agency, a Pakistani tribal area. Many of these would be features of any Sharia regime imposed upon a population that hitherto had not been governed by Islamic law.

Lashkar-e-Islam would:

Enforce “a total ban on the sale of wine” as well as on gambling;
Abolish “interest/usury in business transactions” (as numerous Sharia finance initiatives are already helping Muslims do in the West now);
Ensure “that women are modestly dressed according to Islamic norms when attending school” (as Christian women have already been horse-whipped in Nigeria for not dressing properly according to Islamic standards);
Ban wedding music as well as “celebratory firing into air”;
Permit “only Islamic-style graves” (that is, graves that face Mecca, a practice that a British cemetery already began for all graves, Muslim and non-Muslim, in 2006 -- in a spirit of multiculturalist accommodation, of course);
Forbid women from visiting a doctor or hospital without being accompanied by a male relative.

These are not the fevered dreams of a fringe group. Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, is the foremost authority in Sunni Islam. The BBC has called Al-Azhar’s Grand Sheikh “the highest spiritual authority for nearly a billion Sunni Muslims.” Shortly after 9/11, the New York Times held up Al-Azhar as a beacon of Islamic moderation, saying that the institution “has sought to advise Muslims around the world that those who kill in the name of Islam are nothing more than heretics. It has sought to guide, to reassure Westerners against any clash of civilizations.”

In 1991, Al-Azhar certified a manual of Islamic law as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni Community.” That manual contains such laws as these:

“When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”

“Circumcision is obligatory…for both men and women.”

“The husband may forbid his wife to leave the home.”

“The caliph…makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”

Lashkar-e-Islam’s Mangal Bagh hopes such laws will spread all over the world: “Allah revealed the Koran, which was not sent for any one particular region of the world. It was revealed for all of humanity. We are out to spread Islam throughout the world.”

That includes the United States. It may be unlikely that they will ever succeed, but there is no doubt that they are trying. Stealth jihadists are working energetically to wear away the very fabric of American culture, with the avowed goal of imposing Sharia here. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that an America in which Sharia supremacists succeeded in their goal of making Islamic law as the supreme law of the land would look very different from the America of today -- to say nothing of the America of the Founding Fathers. The Second Amendment, of course, would be out the window: only Muslims could bear arms, not non-Muslim subjugated peoples.

Deep-sixed also would be the First Amendment -- a state religion would be established (Islam, of course) and freedom of speech curtailed. Last year there was revealed a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood sketching out the organization’s strategy in the United States, which emphasized that Brotherhood members “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The existence of Sharia, and of the worldwide imperative to impose it on unwilling populations, should give Americans all the more reason this week to be grateful that we still have the Second Amendment.

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