American law students are drafting Sharia code for the Maldives. From Daniel Pipes at FrontPage, with thanks to DC Watson:
Today, July 26, 2004, is the day any of you who are students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School must get in your resumé and a grade sheet if you want to participate in the newly-announced seminar on “Islamic Criminal Law: Drafting a Criminal Code for the Maldives.”The law school’s registrar, Gloria Watts, sent out a notice informing students of changes in the fall semester’s course offerings, as first noted at LittleGreenFootballs.com. One of the them is that Paul H. Robinson, Colin S. Diver Distinguished Professor of Law, cancelled his “Criminal Law Theory Seminar” and replaced it with the three-credit Maldive project. Robinson’s course description explains the reasons for the shift in the seminar’s topic and its urgency:
The seminar will revolve around a single project: drafting a new criminal code for the Maldives. The work has been requested by the Maldivian government and is sponsored by the United Nations Development Program. Because the Maldives is by constitutional mandate an Islamic nation and, as a matter of law, all citizens are Muslim, the code will be the world’s first criminal code of modern format that is based upon the principles of Shari‘a.
After studying the existing Maldivian criminal law statutes and the criminal law principles contained in Shari’a, student teams will propose criminal code provisions and critique the proposals of others.
Selected students will have the opportunity to travel to the Maldives as part of the U.N. mission to coordinate the criminal code drafting work. (The Maldives is a nation of 1200 islands in the Indian Ocean that has for centuries been a transit point between Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and continues to have strong cultural connections to all three.)
I've posted some comments at my own blog here.
I think Professor Robinson needs an intervention. He is not in any way helping, he is streamlining penal codes of essentially dictatorships (clearly so in the case of China, partly so depending on your sexe in the case of the Maldives), which will use it purely for international public relations efforts.
American law schools are, more generally, scandalous in the innocent way that law professors, themselves at sea with Islam, allow themselves to be buffaloed by colleagues who are Muslim and who, therefore, are naively taken to be truthfully presenting the tenets of Islam. But there is no tradition of objective scholarship in Islam; everything must be done to protect and promote the Faith. Taqiyya and Kitman are the name given to the religiously-sanctioned doctrines of dissimulation, or lying, to protect the faith. It is not even something that need be prompted; apologetics, as every Western scholar of Islam (including Bernard Lewis and Bassam Tibi) is the primary, or indeed only mode, of discussion that Believers will engage in -- defending the Faith not against those who would tell untruths about it, but also and even primarily, against those who would point out truths about it.
When some dean or a handful of faculty get the bright idea that "we really need a course on Islamic law," and then that bright idea is followed by the equally bright idea that "ideally a Muslim should teach it" we are already on the road to disaster. Ideally, it should be undrstood that Muslim law is Sharia, the Holy religious law constructed out of, teased out of, Qur'an and hadith by Muslim jurisconsults and Qur'anic commentators, who declared the "gates of ijtihad" (interpretation) closed a millennium ago. So "Islamic law" is essentially theology, and a law school has no real business teaching theology.
However, if someone wishes to teach a course on "Islam and Human Rights" which will truthfully confront, the impossibility of reconciling the Sharia' with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or, for that matter, with the U.S. Constitution),that person should ideally be either a non-Muslim who will not be inhibited from telling the truth, or slyly explaining away certain passages, or pretending that the Doctrine of Abrogation does not apply to the Qur'an, or in a thousand other ways attempt to protect Islam (perhaps beginning with one of those sanitizied and therefore useless books such as Michael Sells' "Approaching the Qur'an"), or someone such as Reza Afshari (who has written the definite work on the incompatability of Islam with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), or Ibn Warraq (see www.secularislam.org), or Azam Kamguian, or others -- and every day, just as more of the psychically marginal Infidels embraces Islam to find a Total Explanation of the Universe, so more of the most intelligent of those born into Islam leave it -- often for the uncertain exhilaration of unbelief.
Another danger are all those now billing themselfves as "Islamic reformers" when manyu of them are 1) not reformers at all and 2) mislead the unwary Infidels about the precise mechanisms through which they think such "reform" can be achieved -- do they propose to edit the Qur'an? To deny the doctrine of naskh, or abrogation? To rip pages out of the collections of hadith of Bukhari and al-Muslim? How, exactly, do they propose to reform Islam? No, what they really propose is to ensconce themselves, with tenure, by appealing to their colleagues who, however clever they may be in their own fields of endeavor, become innocents abroad when the matter of Islam is raised. And once these Muslim apologists, pretending to be able to present an unbiased and truthful view of Islam -- do they mention Al-Hudaibiyya? Do they note the centrality of Jihad? What do they say about dhimmitude? Do they pretend that certain "Muslim intellectuals" including Averroes, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun, do not support the Jihad to extend the lands under the sway of Islam? There really has to be some attempt to discover what they believe, and what they know, and what they will be telling highly impressionable, and innocent non-Muslim students.
American colleges and universities have permitted what can only be called the takeover of their teaching in the area of Islam and the MIddle East largely by a Muslim staff, or by those non-Muslims who have exhibited a history of pro-PLO "scholarship" or agitation that can safely stand in for being a Believer (such people, even more valuable for presenting certain matters, can be usefully exploited on behalf of the Muslim agenda). Few university presidents have concerned themselves with these matters, preferring to believe that certain scholarly standards have been met (they haven't: the amount of attention, supposedly "scholarly," devoted to the "construction of a Palestinian identiyt" and the concomitant complete inattention to the absolutley central issue of our time, the teachings of Islam, including Jihad and dhimmitude, and how, over time and through space, non-Muslims have historically been treaated once subjugated to Muslim rule, is something that has been paid practicaly no notice.
This has contributed to the widespread ignorance about Islam. It would be a pity if such folly were to be obseved now, in American law schools. A course, taught by someone with no history of being a shill for Islam, who will look steadily and whole at how, in Islam, non-Muslims are regarded, or what is approporiate for women, or how disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims are to be resolved, or the problem of overarching and exclusive loyalty to Islam when it comes into conflict with the loyalty sworn, perhaps pro forma, to obtain or retain citizenship in an Infidel nation-state, or the right of the free exercise of religion (any religion) or no religion -- that is, the right to freedom of conscience, as recognized, or not, in Islam -- all of these are unlikely to be taught truthfully by a Muslim. And unless that is recognized, law schools like universities will be hiring those in the business not of education, but of indoctrination. It is not a mistake this country, or any Infidel land, can any longer afford -- if it ever could.
This isn't really related to the above post, but I thought JW folks might find it interesting. Depending on your level of interest in sub-continental Islam, you might want to register (its free) with www.thefridaytimes.com. For a magazine that's named after the Muslim Sabbath if you will, it is a leading voice of Muslim moderation. But please note that its essentially a mag run by left-leaning Muslims; so, there will be days when the place abounds with some of the famed loony-left screed. It goes without saying that you need to be armed with a bucketful of salt on one of those rainy days.
The present edition might be of particular interest to JW-watchers because the focus of the analysis section this time is on true Islamic reform and on how Muslims need to start taking off those tin-foil hats and start thinking straight; he has liberally quoted Robert Spencer by proxy.
I couldn't post a direct link to the editorial because the website is set in frames.
To know more:
1. Go to www.thefridaytimes.com
2. Register with the website. Its quick and its free.
3. The analysis article I was talking about is titled "Blackening Islam: Crisis of expatriate Muslims" by Khaled Ahmed.
Happy reading folks!
Drafting a criminal code based on Sharia' today is tantamount to a recodification of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The Sharia' is a body of law that is fundamentally incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is not an opinion, it is a self-evident fact.
If the good professor wants to truly serve the interests of the current generation of Maldivians and their descendants and wishes to prevent the spontaneous appearance of mass graves, he and his students need to start with a template of secular codes that is compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and then leave the hocus pocus to the priests.
Thousands of years of recorded history have shown time and again that whenever priests function as lawyers or lawyers function as priests, things always turn out badly indeed.
One presumes, since it is Sharia Law, this enshrines stoning,amputations and beheadings??
Nice One, Professor! Another twit and tool in the
hands of Islamists.
Shria is close to being passed as a form of dispute within the Muslim population. The story is
that it will not supercede Canada's Charter or Constitution,but THATS their story,if nothing would change then why use Sharia.
The arguement goes around and around,our leaders will no doublt pass the bill allowing it,the Islamophobia label sticks really well to non-Muslims and it's sad that Muslims resort to intimindation tactics to have their way.
There is one person from a Islamic org. that loves to throw out the "Sound-bytes" that Canada is a Islamic Country. Why there's even a two part TV special claiming Muslims helped build Canada and have been here for over 150 years. Oh really,then where was Islam when the Natives were being screwed over,where were Muslims during two world wars and Korea,and also the treatment of Blacks and Jews in the last Century.
The next step will be to demand the Government rewrite history books to include Muslims in all pictures and stories.
I'm losing my tolerance for the Muslim clerics that push Islam as a form of Christianty and Judaism while they deny the violence and beheadings by Muslims as having nothing to do with Islam.
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