Monday, February 18, 2008

one Muslim on Shari'a

Sharia cannot be customized for specific countries. These universal, divine laws are for all people of all countries for all times.
--Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy, reported here

Beware the paternalistic non-Muslim who willingly engages in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy to defend an indefensible stance.

Any legitimate interreligious dialogue needs to include a consideration of how members of a tradition view themselves. The above quote is, of course, not one that every Muslim will agree with; it should be obvious that a religion of more than a billion people cannot be reduced to a small set of overgeneralizations. At the same time, it is also wrong to ignore the fact that people in positions of authority, like the above-quoted imam, make strongly worded, hard-to-misinterpret pronouncements, thereby influencing thousands or even millions of believers. Denial that this problem exists is not an option.

By the Calgary-based imam's reckoning, shari'a is not merely a legalistic hermeneutic; it is "universal, divine law."


_

2 comments:

  1. The Imam can have his own opinion but when he intrudes on Levant's freedom (or mine) it's gun time!

    ReplyDelete
  2. One can make a strong case (as does Sam Harris in The End Of Faith) that among Muslims it's the ones who don't espouse sanguinary jihad and sharia-for-all that are the false Scotsmen.

    Good luck with that dialogue...

    ReplyDelete

READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!

All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.

AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.