Creeping Sharia?

Newt Gingrich is fretting about it. Should we be concerned? Here's my take on it from back in 2008, when I was still writing my weekly newspaper column, "Attorney at Large":

Creeping Sharia on College Campuses?
Jim Castagnera
Oct. 28, 2008

In a handful of instances, at least, our institutions of higher learning have gone perhaps a bit too far in adapting to the demands of diverse campuses, where pro-Muslim views and values seemingly must be accommodated. Some have called this arguably excessive tolerance “creeping Sharia.”

“Sharia is the body of Islamic religious law. The term means ‘way’ or ‘path to the water source’; it is the legal framework within which the public and private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence and for Muslims living outside the domain. Sharia deals with many aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business, contracts, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues.”i

Beginning in February 2008, Harvard University’s Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center began setting aside 8:00-10:00 AM and 3:00-5:00 PM for women only. The reason… to accommodate Muslim women, who typically cover their heads and most of their bodies, but who wanted to dress more appropriately for their workoutsiiNot surprisingly, views varied in response to news of Harvard’s trial policy.

“It’s about expanding the range of choices. Women, for all kinds of reasons, don’t want to exercise in front of men. It’s a minority of women, but there are. This modesty business sometimes comes from religion, sometimes from culture. They just don’t want to be ogled by men when they’re working out,” Hussein Ibish, executive director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership told the Today Show’s Matt Lauer.iii

Retorted author Michael Smerconish,iv“Political correctness has run amok again at Harvard. Six individuals out of 6,000 [students] complain,” Smerconish told Lauer. “Those six had access [to the campus gyms] and Harvard’s response is to institute a discriminatory practice where now half are closed out of the gym.”v

A few months earlier, the University of Michigan touched off a small firestorm of protest, when it installed footbaths in some washrooms to accommodate Muslim students wishing to perform ritualistic ablutions prefatory to daily prayer.viPrior to the project’s completion, for example, one critique complained,

DEARBORN -- The University of Michigan-Dearborn plans to spend $25,000 for foot-washing stations, making it easier for Muslim students to practice their religion but sparking questions about the separation of church and state.

The university claims the stations are needed to accommodate Muslim students, who must ritually wash their bodies -- including the feet -- up to five times each day before prayers. But critics hit conservative blogs and radio airwaves Monday to argue public money shouldn't cover the cost.

I have been in airport bathrooms when someone will come up, paying no attention to right or left, and start performing his wudu, while water flies all over the place as that person places his feet, one after the other, in the sink and washes them. While these -- to many -- nauseating public ablutions take place, most people hasten away without going near even the empty sinks.

There is no god-given right to come to other countries and inflict one's behavior, in fulfilling some kind of faith-based mandate, in public places. The nurses who were arrested for singing Christmas carols behind closed doors, in their own apartments in Western apartment complexes, in Saudi Arabia, were not inflicting this on anyone: it was the religious police checking up, as they do everywhere they can. But, for example, the slitting of a sheep's throat, and letting it bleed to death on the street, can and should be banned -- whether or not this is considered "part of Islam."

If Muslim students wish to have foot-washing sinks available, then they can certainly pay for them. After all, there is hardly a mosque or a madrasa in this country that does not receive, when it needs it, all kinds of financial support from those who, across the seas, batten on the unmerited oil trillions, and by this point have used, collectively, more than one hundred billion of it (the estimate for Saudi Arabia alone) to pay for mosques, madrasas, armies of Western hirelings, and propaganda of every sort.vii

Whether the critics are correct or not, one is hard pressed to perceive a non-sectarian school setting aside such accommodations for Mennonite or Orthodox Jewish constituencies.
i

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia
ii

Bob Considine, “Harvard Gym Restriction Stirs Controversy,” TODAYShow.com, March 10, 2008,http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23556551/(last accessed October 11, 2008).
iii

Ibid.
iv

Author ofMuzzled: From T-Ball to Terrorism --- True Stories that Should Be Fiction.
v

Considine,op cit.
vi

Noah Feldman, “The Way We Live Now: Universal Faith,”New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2007, available athttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26wwln-lede-t.html(last accessed October 11, 2008).
vii

Hugh Fitzgerald, “No Public Funds for Islamic Footbaths,”Dhimmi Watch, June 9, 2007,http://jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/016829.php(last access October 11, 2008).

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at a New Jersey university. His newest book,Al Qaeda Goes to College: Impact of the War on Terror on Higher Education,is in the production stage here at Praeger.]