Not only the Sharia but also ...

Submitted by George P (United States), Aug 6, 2009 at 12:05

Dear Dr Pipes:

I 100% concur with you that secular societies should oppose the acceptance/imposition of Sharia law. I will go one step beyond and with good reasons -- secular minded people of the world should also oppose the Islamic stock market indexes, the Islamic mutual funds, the Islamic systems of government, the Islamic banking and such.

What are my reasons for saying this? The religions of the world share many good values. Branding these values under one single banner and claiming them as your own is akin to plagiarism. Consider the example of morality of earning interest on loaned money. While some people will consider interest as the cost of money and find nothing immoral about it, some others will find extorting interest as immoral. It is a perfectly secular and perfectly debatable issue and there is nothing Islamic about it.

Muslims have a tendency to brand more and more things as their own and isolate themselves from the societies that they live in. The key for Islam's emancipation --if I may say so-- is to secularize good principles of Islam and leave the bad ones in the religious books. When muslims start doing it they will find that they share more and more with the rest of us and others are neither superior nor inferior to them. For this reason, while I see full justification behind the existence of Islamic religious doctrines (how to pray, where to pray, when to pray), I see no justification for Islamic law, Islamic banking, Islamic governments, and such.

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