Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
A suggestion for US CENTCOM and OIR Commanders: send up a trial balloon among Iraqi and Kurd leadership for a conference, informal but serious, titled something like:
Islam Without Sharia
or:
Islam Without Sharia: Freeing Religion From Law
That would make a productive conference at the CTC or the Academy itself, also.
It is the real problem with those cats, you know: identifying religious law with civil law. It is also the problem for their countrymen who would like to practice Islam without Sharia, and I am sure there are not a few. Christians got that crap — identifying religious and civil law — out of their system via the 30 Years War, which neither side could win because both were right in part and wrong in part, and secular authority — the nobles — stepped in and called a halt, forever separating religious law from civil law in the orbit of the Latin Church — aka Western Civilization. Thank God!
That’s really what the Iraqis need. First they need to just start thinking and talking about it at leader level.
Even during my lifetime there have been plenty of Muslims who did not use Sharia Law, i.e., religious law as civil law and vice versa. Even today some do not, e.g., for the most part Kurds, and Egyptians and Jordanians not a few — probably even some Afghans — would love to do that.
If they won’t do it themselves, then ultimately the momentum of a world-level military campaign will be turned on them to get the job done. Without patience, and even at this point, I would say deservedly so.
Update 1: Over the past two years the increasingly skeptical citizenry of the United States and Europe has been treated to a stream of op-eds and television appearances lamenting the looming collapse of the liberal world order, to be accompanied by a surge of illiberalism, nationalism, and fringe politics. Rarely, however, does such hand-wringing stray beyond shopworn comparisons of the “complex interdependence” of the glorious past and the parochialism and narrow-mindedness of the current era. In truth, we are not witnessing a dramatic systemic change driven by conniving external forces, but a meltdown of political authority in the West caused by the relatively straightforward indolence of its political class. Our troubles are less about liberalism’s decline or the ascendancy of left or right politics. Simply put, the citizenry in the West has been frustrated for decades with its elites’ inability to deliver workable solutions to the problems of slow growth, deindustrialization, immigration, and the overall decline of self-confidence across the West.
The legitimacy, and hence stability, of the international system rests to a degree on the ability of the leading powers to deliver at home—or, simply put, to govern. The increasing volatility of international politics is in part a byproduct of systemic dysfunction across the West at the level of domestic politics. Americans and Europeans alike are running out of patience with the governing class. In Europe, the government’s inability to control mass migration or develop effective solutions to domestic terrorism are two important drivers of the growing public discontent. In the United States the middle and working classes have been frustrated for decades with the government’s inability to remedy de-industrialization, urban decay, and declining economic opportunity.
Glenn Reynolds comments: And in both places, as the “elite” has grown demonstrably less competent and honest, it has also grown visibly more contemptuous of the people it purports to govern. That contempt is, I think, the most poisonous part of the whole equation.
My essays on the question of authority are here.
Update 2: Egypt Goes About The Task Of Reforming Religious Rhetoric
Update 3: Archbishop of Canterbury gets it right about Islam and law in Latin Culture. Also here.
Update 4: Andrew G. Bostom: Leo III’s 1300-Year-Old Lesson: Understand Islam to Defeat Jihad
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
