Ground Zero Mosque Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf once said this about Sharia’s compatibility with the U.S. Constitution: “The only truly clashing area is the penal code, and no Muslim has the intention of introducing that to America. The penal code is the area that people in the Western world are worried about — but these are things that aren’t even observed today in most of the Muslim world. Apart from the Taliban and a few places like that, where do you see this happening?” Brunei.
Meanwhile, the renowned scholar of Sharia Reza Aslan has said: “There’s really no such thing as just Sharia, it’s not one monolithic Continuum – Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it’s understood in many different ways…” 1,500 years! That would take us back to the year 514 — so apparently Aslan thinks that Sharia predates Islam, which according to the canonical view came into being nearly 100 years after that, in 610, when Muhammad supposedly received his first revelation from the angel Gabriel. Anyway, Aslan is also wrong about Sharia being so amorphous as to defy characterization. Everywhere it is implemented today, and everywhere that it has been implemented historically, it has looked pretty much the same — as we see again in the form of Sharia that Brunei is about to implement.
