It’s already here. 2106 fortified mosques in the US. Muslims in small towns in Alaska.
They’re here.
“While the Constitution seems to give more power to the general public to enact legislation than conforms to the traditional Muslim practice of developing legislation by legal scholarship rooted in revelation, it does not necessarily follow that the U.S. Constitution would be
unacceptable to Muslims. On the contrary, if the people of the United States were Muslims, they could choose to operate under the U.S. Constitution to enact laws onsistent with Islamic law and even to amend the Constitution as might be necessary to bring it into line with Islamic principles.
No doubt Muslims would disagree as to what amendments are necessary. As Muhammad is no longer with us to arbitrate such disputes, they would have to rely on sound scholarship to resolve such questions.40 There are also some Muslims who maintain that the Constitution in essence is opposed to
the Qur’an because it is a document founded on the premise of human freedom that denies man’s essence as the servant of God.41 My understanding of the intention of the Founding Fathers is that the Constitution’s purpose is to secure men’s freedom from other men, not from God. The
signers of the Declaration of Independence, at least, appealed to, rather than resented, the “laws of nature and Nature’s God.â€
Any belief that human legislation can rid man of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God is one that, I believe, the Prophet would reject as a self-defeating form of wishful thinking. In this respect, we find that the American Constitution is a human endeavor to avoid fitna (as we have
defined it above). Indeed, we find James Madison’s eloquent description of violent factionalism as fitna could easily be addressed to the state of the Muslim world today (and indeed throughout too much of its history):
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.
Madison argues that by the same token by which we do not trust individuals to be the judges of their own case in disputes over such matters as religion and politics for fear of bias or corruption, the different factions of legislators are only “advocates and parties to the causes which they determine.â€
Madison’s rejection to the argument that “enlightened†statesmen are above such difficulties applies as well to “pious†statesmen: “It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good.
Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarelyprevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.â€44 Since we cannot remove the causes of fitna, Madison argues that the
federal republican system will control its effects.
Madison’s arguments, in their strongest form, are that a federal republican system with a separation of powers and a difficult-to-change constitution offer the best protection from fitna of the majority by the minority or vice versa. From the Muslim point of view, such a constitutional mechanism offers hope for an Islamic renaissance when it is implemented within the framework of an Islamic worldview held by a majority of the voting population. This study thus suggests the powerful appeal to Muslims of the concept of an Islamic republic. “
“On the US Constitution from the perspective of the Qur’an”
http://r.duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.minaret.org%2Fconstitution2.pdf