Andrew Gilligan and Alex Spillius: Barack Obama adviser says Sharia Law is misunderstood
Monday, October 12th, 2009Miss [Dalia] Mogahed, appointed to the President’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified” and the majority of women around the world associate it with “gender justice”. The White House adviser made the remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party. The group believes in the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world. Miss Mogahed appeared alongside Hizb ut Tahrir’s national women’s officer, Nazreen Nawaz.
During the 45-minute discussion, on the Islam Channel programme Muslimah Dilemma earlier this week, the two members of the group made repeated attacks on secular “man-made law” and the West’s “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism”. They called for Sharia Law to be “the source of legislation” and said that women should not be “permitted to hold a position of leadership in government”. Miss Mogahed made no challenge to these demands and said that “promiscuity” and the “breakdown of traditional values” were what Muslims admired least about the West. She said: “I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media. The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance. The portrayal of Sharia has been oversimplified in many cases.” [...]
Miss Mogahed admitted that even many Muslims associated Sharia with “maximum criminal punishments” and “laws that… to many people seem unequal to women,” but added: “Part of the reason that there is this perception of Sharia is because Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood.” The video of the broadcast has now been prominently posted on the front page of Hizb ut Tahrir’s website.
Miss Mogahed, who was born in Egypt and moved to America at the age of five, is the first veiled Muslim woman to serve in the White House. Her appointment was seen as a sign of the Obama administration’s determination to reach out to the Muslim world. She is also the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a project which aims to scientifically sample public opinion in the Muslim world. During this week’s broadcast, she described her White House role as “to convey… to the President and other public officials what it is Muslims want.”
Article continues at link. Wikipedia confirms Miss Mogahed’s role in President Obama’s Council. Miss Mogahed was on this television program due to her leadership role in the United States government. There are a limited number of ways to interpret the simultaneous nature of Miss Mogahed’s leadership in government and her faith which prohibits women having leadership in government. She could consider Islam to be a two-tiered superstition, with one rule for other women and another rule for herself. Or she could consider it acceptable to tell a lie to non-Muslims as long as Islam is advanced through that lie. In the West these acts are called hypocrisy, lying, propaganda, manipulation, treason, betrayal, machiavellian, etc. In the Muslim world, these are called Taqiyya [neutral] [pro] [con].
“You just don’t understand” is sometimes presented as a way of saying “you just don’t agree” by people who consider themselves to have a direct line to immutable and obvious truth. Because they hold the immutable truth, and because truth is obvious, anyone who disagrees must not understand. If they understood, they would agree. But no one has a line to immutable truth, and truth is not obvious. “You just don’t understand” is the mistaken notion that exposure to a claim will magically cause the observer to adopt it. We all can err. There is no ultimate foundation of truth claims to build on, but we can build on the practice of identifying our errors and not repeating them. No particular group has a monopoly on the “you just don’t understand” ruse. Feminists use it and so do fundamentalists. It’s used on the left and the right. Believers use it and atheists use it. No matter how many people use it (and I admit I have in the past), this ruse is not a proof of the claim in question. It is an attempt to evade criticism and introspection. When lives are at stake, it is contemptible.
Regarding Sharia law as gender justice or justice for women, I will defer to the experts. Experts like Tulay Goren and Yasmine Larbi-Cherif and Ayman Udas and Sabina Akhtar and Aasiya Hassan and Sahar Daftary and Lidia Motylska and Sandeela Kanwal and Morsal Obeidi and Hatin Surucu and Banaz Mahmood and Aqsa Parvez and Caneze Riaz and Uzma Rahan and Samaira Nazir and Hina Salem and Methal Dayem and Sazan Bajez-Abdullah and Rudayena Jemael and Hesha Yones and Ibtihaz Hasoun and Fadime Sahindal and Zahida Peeveen and Ghazala Khan and Dua Khalil and Rim Abu Ghanem and Sabia Rani and other experts and these experts as well and another group of experts and more experts. If you’re not at work and have a strong stomach, you can even see images and videos of experts as they earn their expertise.
The Wikipedia entry on Hiz ut-Tahrir appears even handed. Unlike the Telegraph, it does not identify Hiz ut-Tahrir as extremist. It confirms the group “wants combine all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, ruled by Islamic law and with a caliph head of state elected by Muslims.” Wikipedia claims Hiz ut-Tahrir is opposed to violence and has a focus “on ‘ideological struggle’ to establish its vision of the caliphate in the minds of Muslims.” This is the democracy that Hiz ut-Tahrir claims to be dead-set against, and so what they are opposing when they oppose democracy is unclear. Perhaps they intend to use democracy to get in power, then destroy democracy? It’s happened before. Perhaps they oppose violence until they get into power, then… ? That’s happened before too.
Miss Mogahed is the first veiled Muslim woman to serve in the White House. In the United States is is neither forbidden nor compulsory for a woman to veil herself in most (not all) situations. Miss Mogahed may be projecting her own liberties (oh, those lethal liberties) on women in the Muslim world. Hiz ut-Tahrir is less confused on the issue: Article 116 of their draft constitution makes the veil obligatory for women. Debating the veil is a low-hanging fruit in the West. It’s easy to fight for the right to wear a veil when it’s an option and you can pretend your options are shared elsewhere. It’s also a good distraction from more pressing concerns for women in Islam. Issues like Muslim girls being able to go to school without being blown up, poisoned or burned with acid.
I prefer the lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism to anything the Muslim world is offering up in the 21st Century.
