Stavis: Shilling for Sharia at Harvard

[This piece of mine appeared at Frontpage Magazine yesterday. -HS]

As an old photographic print slowly becomes visible when immersed in developing solution, Noah Feldman's ultimate advocacy construct, namely, that Sharia law represents the highest concept of "The Rule of Law", first began to darken the paper in his 2005 book, Divided by God when he was still a professor at NYU. Three years later, his rising star, snatched out of the sky by his undergraduate alma mater, Harvard, following his "royal commission" to draft the Iraqi constitution ("I had a small role advising the Iraqi drafters"), the wunderkind's promotion of Sharia has finally blossomed with the publication of The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. As if prefaced by his statement in 2005 concerning the First Amendment: "that government "[allow] greater space for public manifestations of religion", Professor Feldman has now emerged as the dhimmi shill par excellence as the West's chief promoter of Sharia Law.

If all this seems a bizarre role for someone who attended the Orthodox Maimonides School near Boston, it is in line with the career trajectory of a very bright young man who wants to be preeminent among the severely compromised academics inhabiting The Middle East Studies Association and as a latter day Shmuel ha Nagid (Granada's 11^th century Jewish vizier to the Berber sultan Habbus al-Muzaffar) in the courts of The Middle East.

A week after his piece in The New York Times Magazine, "Why Shariah?",
Feldman presented his advocacy position during Harvard's Interfaculty Initiative on Contemporary State and Society in the Islamic World. The Initiative previously featured UCLA's Khaled Abou el Fadl who set the tone for the series with his opening statement that "Whether Sharia complies - or does not comply - with fundamental human rights is vacuous and irrelevant." So much for a thousand years of western humanist thought and liberal jurisprudence. With one terse pronouncement, the Harvard series vitiated the West's bedrock of liberal thought from The Magna Carta to Rutherford, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau.

What was different about Feldman's lecture vs. his magazine piece was what he left out of his lecture. Obviously, any discussion of Sharia must include what informs the law at its heart -- The Koran, Sunna and, to a lesser extent, Sira. Writing for the Times, he at least traced the roots of Sharia to The Koran. But that was as far as he would go. At Harvard, his analysis of Sharia was limited to "The Rule of Law" as interpreted by "scholars" producing an Islamic "constitution"; all of which is refined and perfected by a "balance of power" between rulers and scholars. If all of this echoes the Western experience, it does, but not in the reality of history, but rather as part and parcel of Feldman's attempt to normalize 1400 years of Islamic supremacism.

To Feldman, Sharia evolves from "Higher Law" to "The Rule of Law" in a neat conflation of the Secular with the Holy that places sacralized Islamic code alongside the West's rigorously evolved concept of secular justice (Feldman suggests that the dreaded huddud laws of amputation and other draconian penalties for apostasy and blasphemy are mere "worldly commands" despite the literal Koranic instructions, for example -- Sura 5:33 which prescribes amputation of limbs "on opposite sides", a dreadful penalty that has found new life in some of the Sharia ruled lands today.

The fundamental nature of Sharia Law, whatever its current pragmatic accommodations, is inextricably connected to divine revelation -- a concept the West did away with centuries ago -- is utterly missing from his lecture. The fact that the Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal, was recently spared the Hadithic-inspired penalty of being stoned to death for adultery is explained more by international outrage and pressure than by any "nuanced" application of traditional Sharia Law.

The evolution of Western jurisprudence can be seen as a fission process, separating and rejecting ecclesiastical and divine-right monarchical statutes while the revival of Sharia Law can be seen as a fusion process, reasserting the connection between statutes and religious revelation. In effect, Feldman cloaks this bold leap backwards to the Middle Ages beneath the sophistry of citing the 11^th Century Baghdad jurist, al-Mawardi as a shining example of the purity of Sharia in the face of the abuse of secular rulers. A pity Professor Feldman failed to note that the medieval Basra scholar was a staunch proponent of Jihad war and violent imposition of Sharia law as it applied to dhimmis, that is, Christians and Jews. Al-Mawardi writes in his epic Laws of Islamic Governance of the Jizhya or compulsory poll tax levied on dhimmis,

Similarly passed over by Feldman are some telling observations on Sharia by one of Professor Feldman's favorite historians of Islam, Sir Hamilton Gibb:

We find no reference whatsoever, in either Professor Feldman's New York Times article or in his recent lecture, to Sharia and its impact on non-Muslims, whether they be dhimmis (Christians and Jews (people of the book) or idolaters (those that "associate" other gods with Allah -- mushrikun). The body count and divinely inspired discriminatory laws resulting from the Muslim conquests of the 7^th century up to the present belie Feldman's grandiose apologetic that "...Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world."³

Indeed, even a critic with relatively uncritical tendencies when it comes to Islam, Alan Wolfe of Boston College, recognizes Feldman's intent:

You guess which religion.

Noah Feldman may have his sights set on a tenured position at Al Azhar University in Cairo under its Grand Imam, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, whose tafsir (exegesis) of the Koran (3:113) says "All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not." He may yet attain the next level of dhimmitude with a few more lectures on the inevitability of Sharia.

¹Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY 2005 p.29

²H.A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, "Islamic Society and The West," Vol. 1, London, 1957) p. 208

³Noah Feldman, "Why Sharia?", New York Times Magazine, March 16, 2008. p. 1

⁴http://www.slate.com/id/2123459