Yesterday, the St. Petersburg Times reported on a new civil case in Tampa, Florida that’s become a cause célèbre on the right:
Hillsborough Circuit Judge Richard Nielsen is being attacked by conservative bloggers after he ruled in a lawsuit March 3 that, to resolve one crucial issue in the case, he will consult a different source.
“This case,” the judge wrote, “will proceed under Ecclesiastical Islamic Law.”
According to some conservatives, this is a troubling sign that the American legal system is under attack from Sharia law (one activist called it a sign of a new “Islamic Tsunami“). Adam Serwer examines the evidence and says that, actually, this is really, really normal:
The judge however, isn’t invoking Islamic law because he simply felt like it, he’s doing so because this is essentially a contract dispute in which the agreement was drawn up according to sharia…
Where there’s a conflict between civil law and the terms of a contract, civil law holds sway. You could not, for example, sell yourself into slavery or force your spouse to sign a contract where they would be subject to abuse. So the notion that the presence of Islamic law in civil arbitration will inevitably lead to sharia replacing the Constitution is nonsense. This kind of case is a sign of America’s growing Muslim population, which for many of those complaining is probably the real source of worry.
Right. The argument you tend to hear from conservatives concerns impending implementation of radical forms of Sharia. That is, if we don’t act now, at some indeterminate point in the future the bad kind of Sharia—stoning, for instance—will take hold in the United States and we’ll be powerless to stop it. Sounds scary. But stories like this one out of Florida, and the ensuing freakout, reveal that to be somewhat disingenuous. Anti-sharia activists think that any sort of Islamic law is a threat to be taken seriously, even if it’s something so mundane as a contract dispute between the Islamic Education Center of Tampa and two aggrieved former trustees—and even if it’s not much different from Jewish or Christian codes.
