Calling Islam a 'Religion' Guarantees We Keep Fighting Symptoms Instead of the System

The West keeps losing because it treats Islam as a private religion, when Islam’s own sources define it as a complete legal and political system - so governments fight isolated symptoms while the system itself keeps advancing.

For decades, Western governments have dealt with Islam in pieces. Violence is treated as an emergency. Schools, finance, charities and councils are often treated as opportunities. A terrorist organization is prohibited... Someone proposes a ban on Sharia. An Islamic school is opened and applauded. A charity is later found to have funded jihad... An organization is examined for Brotherhood links. Businesses seek halal certification to expand their market. Then another controversy erupts over accommodation or a Sharia council... 

We keep putting out fires without addressing their common source. 

There is a more fundamental question that should have been asked long ago: What is Islam?

The Classification Error

Western constitutional systems developed around a particular understanding of religion. The principle of toleration that took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced the premise that religious belief belonged principally to the private sphere...

Islam developed differently. Its foundational sources address not only prayer and behaviour, but marriage, divorce, inheritance, trade and commerce, taxation, criminal conduct, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, warfare, government and law...

Once the classification is wrong, the policies constructed upon it inevitably begin from the wrong premise...

"Ban Sharia" encounters an even greater difficulty... Sharia isn't merely a criminal code. It reaches into prayer, fasting, diet, hygiene, marriage, inheritance, finance, commerce and countless details of daily life, relationships with non-Muslims, as well as matters of governance, crime and punishment...

Workplace, hospitals and civic accommodations illustrate the point: prayer rooms, gyms converted into prayer space, timetable changes for salah (prayer), all-halal catering because it is cheaper than two menus, extra leave for Eid and Hajj, refusal to shake hands, alcohol-free events... women who will not be treated by a male doctor or meet a male supervisor alone, men who will not take direction from a female supervisor, pressure to exclude dogs... Multi-faith rooms at hospitals, airports and schools are quickly covered with prayer rugs; others are then told they do not belong. Complain, and the charge is racism. Add Islamic schools, Islamic finance and Islamic enclaves in which social pressure enforces Sharia norms. None of this is a criminal offence. None of it is touched by a statute that only restates existing criminal law. 

... We cannot win an endless game of institutional whack-a-mole...

Establish the Threshold

... It is a means test for public privilege. Any creed or ideological system seeking designated public benefits would be required to satisfy the same objective threshold...

The test is civic, not theological. It asks whether a system accepts equality before the law, including testimony, inheritance and divorce; freedom to enter or leave a creed; rejection of coercion; rejection of slavery; equal civil status regardless of sex or creed; acceptance of constitutional law as the supreme civil authority; and rejection of violence or discriminatory treatment used to impose a creed...

What Would Change?

What would change is the assumption that everything presented under the heading of "religion" automatically qualifies for the institutional protections and advantages Western governments have attached to that category. Once that presumption is removed, governments would have to reconsider areas including tax-exempt and charitable status, public funding, foreign funding, institutional recognition, workplace accommodations, Islamic finance, institutional zakat collection, foreign funding, Islamic schools, Sharia-based arbitration and religious requirements imposed upon publicly funded institutions. Where a belief system has failed the threshold, the privileges are withdrawn...

The West still treats Islam as a leftover from another age. That is arrogance, not analysis. A system that has lasted fourteen centuries, reproduces itself through law, schools, finance and communal duty, and states its aim of dominion in its own sources is doing what it said it would do...

... start with the source, correct the classification, establish the threshold and apply it universally. Private belief remains protected; public privilege must satisfy public standards...

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