- Sharia, - or Islamic law, influences the legal code in most Muslim countries. A movement to allow sharia to govern personal status law, a set of regulations that pertain to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody, is even expanding into the West.
The Sharia Muslims speak of today is very different from the Sharia that existed during the time of the Prophet. The four dominant Sunni Islamic schools of thought—Hanbali, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanafi—did not even exist during Muhammad's reign. Like the contested doctrine of Quranic abrogation, the schools of thought were all developed centuries later after the Prophet's death by religious scholars and men. Mere fallible bearded men, rarely women in case you haven't noticed.
And it was their far-too-often overlooked fallibility that An-Na'im emphasized for me. Sharia—in practice at least—cannot and should not be considered divine, because its interpretation, formulation, and application will always inevitably be the effort of fallible men prone to mistakes and the influence of their cultural, political, and social environments.
The conclusion is straightforward - "The Sharia as a divine project is a lie. Sharia in Iran, Sharia in the Maliki school of thought, Sharia on the moon— any Sharia. The supposed and far-too-often assumed divinity of them all is and always will be a lie. By pure virtue of being interpreted and applied by men, Sharia in practice ceases to be divine."
As for secularism, and Islam's stance on apostasy and free intellectual inquiry, in the words of Abdullahi An-Na'im:
"If I don't have the freedom to disbelieve, I cannot believe."
Whether or not it contradicted the religious literature of the Islamic tradition, An-Na'im's one-sentence statement of wisdom did it for me. It was bulletproof. It gave me the answer my heart was desperately seeking. It also made me rethink the notion of sin, and how the policing of morality can
and does lead to a society rife with hypocrisy and hollow acts of goodness.
Finally, as An-Na'im would come to write in his uplifting book Islam and the Secular State,
"In order to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, which is the only way one can be a Muslim, I need a secular state," meaning "one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine," and "that facilitates the possibility of religious piety out of honest conviction."
Apparently and contrary to popular opinion, "throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate." This does not entail an authoritarian model like Ataturk's Turkey, for that is a secularist state, one that regulates religion and forces Muslim women to take off their hair cover, and is such a violation of liberty.
Amir Ahmad Nasr - My Isl@m (pp. 145-146)
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
