Posted by fschmidt on
URL: https://mikraite.arkian.net/Sharia-tp2841.html

Sharia is Islamic religious law.  My view on this subject is not going to appeal to mainstream Muslims.  So if you are a closed-minded Muslim, please stop reading now.  If you are open-minded, you will still disagree but at least you will tolerate my views.  Note that I am not Muslim and I have no intention of promoting my views expressed here to anyone.  I am only writing this to explain my thinking, nothing more.

I am against the idea of Sharia.  Law is not part of religion, so "religious law" is a contradiction in terms.  It is like "religious engineering" which is obvious nonsense.  But this is not to say that religion shouldn't impact law.  Religion is about principles and values that should guide one's life, so everything one does, including making laws and engineering, should be inspired by one's religion.  But that doesn't make it part of religion.

To explain my reasoning, I need to go through the history of the major prophets - Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.  In English translations of the Old Testament, you will find frequent mentions of "the law".  These are all mistranslations of the Hebrew "ha-torah" which means something like "the teaching".  In fact the correct Hebrew translation of "the law" doesn't appear in the Old Testament at all.  Of course the Old Testament is full of laws.  But what role do these laws play in "the teaching" which is the general description of the Old Testament itself?  For one thing, the Old Testament recounts history and Moses was a political leader, so he did make laws which were recorded.  But more importantly, these laws are examples of applying God's teaching to law.  The ability to do this is critical for any functional society.  But the distinction between the teaching and the laws must be understood.  God's teaching is eternal.  This teaching contains fundamental principles that do not change because human nature does not change significantly.  On the other hand, laws are fundamentally not eternal.  Laws should be the application of correct principles to current conditions, and since conditions change, laws must change.  What about something like the Ten Commandments, for example the commandment not to murder?  This is a general rule, so it is a principle.  It is not specific enough to work as a law.  For example it doesn't distinguish between manslaughter and intentional murder.  Such distinctions are covered elsewhere in the Torah, and these are laws.  In other words, these are the proper application of the principle that one shouldn't murder.

By the time of Jesus, Judaism had become very legalistic.  The distinction between principles and laws had been lost.  Jesus rebelled against this error and emphasized that religion is about principles.  Because Jesus was not a political leader, he made no laws.  He was free to focus on the core of what religion is really about.  But unfortunately some Christians take this to the extreme and think that this means that they don't have to follow any rules.  This is clearly wrong, one must always make rules based on God's principles but the rules should be appropriate to the circumstances.

Muhammad was like Moses in being both a prophet and a political leader.  So of course Muhammad made laws.  But the Quran contains far fewer laws than the Torah does.  Why?  I think because God tried to emphasize principles as much as possible, and avoid laws except the few needed to guide Muhammad at the time.  If God's intention with religion is to provide a legal code, then God would have given us a legal code directly.  But in fact the opposite happened, God only decreased legal advice over time.

What about hadiths?  Hadiths are not from God.  But that doesn't make them worthless.  Hadiths are valuable historical documents that show how Muhammad applied Islamic principles to situations in his life.  Muslims claim that Muhammad was micromanaged by God, so his actions are like God's message in the Quran.  But this makes no sense.  If God wanted us to follow some detailed script, God could have made the Quran 1000 times larger and included it all there.  And to me, the idea that Muhammad needed to be micromanaged is actually insulting to Muhammad.  My view is that God picks prophets who are intelligent enough to understand and apply what God says, so that they don't need to be micromanaged.  And we can learn from the actions of the prophets by trying to understand what principles the prophets used to choose their actions.

So this is why I reject the idea of sharia.  Of course Muslims should use Islamic principles to guide their laws, but these laws are not part of religion.  And Muslims should not blindly copy Muhammad as described in hadiths, but should instead follow Muhammad's example of using intelligence to correctly apply Islamic principles to current circumstances.

So where do we stand today?  Unfortunately we live in an idiocracy where people are just too stupid to understand religion.  This applies equally to all religions.  So the pressing issue is to raise human intelligence until there is a non-trivial minority in religion who can properly understand religion and guide the rest of the people in the religion.  This is what my Arkian project is for.

But there still remains the general question of how best to apply religious rules today.  I think the Anabaptists and Jews have the right answer here, which is to apply rules at the level of religious communities, not through government institutions.  This allows maximum diversity of rules so that we can see which set of rules work best.  This effectively leaves judgement of these rules to God.

Some Muslims will complain that this violates the Quran by creating sects.  But again this misses the point that the rules of a religious community are not part of religion itself, so there is no division in religion here as long as different communities recognize each other as all being valid Muslims.

Besides being currently optimal, applying rules to religious communities is most practical.  It is much easier to get one mosque to apply a set of rules to its members than it is to gain and maintain control at a political level.  If you want to implement Quran 24:2 punishing fornicators, you could do this at a mosque level by giving members a choice between accepting punishment or losing membership to the mosque.  In theory a mosque could also have non-Muslim members in a dhimmi status so that they can be part of the community.

Finally I should explain why I will not try to push these beliefs on anyone.  First, because I am not Muslim, so this really isn't my business.  But second, because any attempt to reform religion is pointless while human intelligence is so low.  At this point, the only thing that matters is raising human intelligence, either through my Arkian project or by some other means.  So this is where my focus is.