If you live in California, the California Department of Education is taking testimony today and tomorrow on its course revisions. Contact information is included at the end of this article:
Shariah Studies by Stealth
AIM Column | By Malcolm A. Kline | July 17, 2009
Under some pressure from parents, California’s Education Department is reviewing its guidelines for teaching Islamic Studies to seventh-graders in its public schools. We wrote about this trend six years ago when we discovered that, though the California standards require the study of all religions, Islam is examined disproportionately.
Moreover, the more extreme elements of the more radically Islamic societies, though they represent a minority of a religion whose adherents are overwhelmingly peaceful, are ignored, no matter how visible their acts are. The latest attempt to revamp the California rules adds a new wrinkle to this approach.
[Yeah, I once knew a guy in the Mafia. He was a peaceful man. Didn’t kill anyone. Didn’t beat his wife or kids. Didn’t do all that violent Mafia crap. Of course, he’s in jail now. His crime? Laundering money for the Mob…
Which, leads me to this whole “peaceful Muslim” thing: Just because the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not out on the streets killing innocent men and women, that does not absolve the majority of them from being guilty in some way of aiding and abetting terrorists. If they were truly peaceful, they wouldn’t believe Jihad to be the duty of all Muslims, nor would a sizable chunk of their zakat and sadaqah (religious taxes and charity) go to the support of terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, etc. ]
For example, the treatment of Shari’ah law in the framework for Islamic studies developed by the California Department of Education is, to say the least, problematic. “Students learn how the Qur’an and the Sunnah served as foundations for the Shari’ah, the religious laws governing moral social, and economic life,” the suggested framework reads. “Islamic law, for example, rejected the older Arabian view of women as ‘family property,’ declaring that women and men are entitled to respect and moral self-governance.”
“At the same time, students investigate the role of women in Islamic civilizations.” One page later we get, “Muslim merchants came to operate from China to the Mediterranean, their trade facilitated by shared acceptance of Shari’ah law.”
Yet all the available evidence indicates that Shari’ah law is hardly benign even in its present incarnation. “Major principles of shariah are a ban on interest, a ban on contractual uncertainty, adherence to risk-sharing and profitsharing, promotion of ethical investments that enhance society, and asset-backing,” Shayerah Ilias reports in a February 9, 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). “The international market for Islamic finance has grown between 10% to 15% annually in recent years.”
“Islamic finance historically has been concentrated in Persian Gulf and Southeast Asian countries, but has expanded globally to both Muslim and non-Muslim countries.”
Ilias is an analyst in international trade and finance at the CRS. As its name suggests, the CRS is a research arm of the U. S. Congress.
“There is a small but growing market for Islamic finance in the United States,” Ilias writes. “Through international and domestic regulatory bodies, there has been effort to standardize regulations in Islamic finance across different countries and financial institutions, although challenges remain.”
“Critics of Islamic finance express concerns about possible ties between Islamic finance and political agendas or terrorist financing and the use of Islamic finance to circumvent U.S. economic sanctions.”
Analysts at Shariah Finance Watch (SFW) , who track the application of the law in the world today, do not take quite so sanguine a view of it. A project of the Center for Security Policy, SFW examines how this body of law works in and out of the Middle East.
“Understanding Shariah law is integral to understanding the dangers of Shariah-compliant finance,” the SFW website argues. “Shariah law is Islamic law dating back to the 7th century and is today the law of the land in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and the law under which the Taliban operates.”
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Opinionated Infidels