Source: NY Times.
WASHINGTON — Long before he announced his presidential run this year, Newt Gingrich had become the most prominent American politician to embrace an alarming premise: that Shariah, or Islamic law, poses a threat to the United States as grave as or graver than terrorism.
For Newt Gingrich, in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Shariah is a concern akin to terrorism.“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”
Categories: Americas
Separation of Mosque and State and freedom of individuals to understand their scripture:
In this short comment, I articulate a clean and concise understanding of Separation of Mosque and State.
If we lump all possible Islamic teachings together, it is not an honest dialogue but merely political posturing! Each and every recommendation of Sharia, whether it is mentioned in the Holy Quran or not, whether it is about individual life or social life, should be judged on its utilitarian value and not lumped together with all other teachings to promote the monster of Islamophobia or a political agenda of grabbing power.
Individuals have varying understanding about their scripture and some of those understandings could be grandiose or beyond reality. But, these can never be forced on a society and they cannot be forced away from their opinions. Any teaching in a scripture or the Holy Quran only gives a suggestion or a choice in a pluralistic society. Any verse applicable to a social, political, economic or judicial aspect of life should not be taken as mandate. In a pluralistic society, a congress could discuss the merit of any idea, or lack thereof, whether it comes from the Quran, the Bible, the mind of a visionary or someone with a myopic vision, like Gingrich. As long as we agree on the legislative process and have set our priorities as a society there should be perfect peace and harmony!
So, individual is free to think whatever he decides about scope of the Holy Quran but in society, every teaching has to go through a civic process. Intelligence agencies could manage to control any mutiny against the due process by Mullahs, be they Muslims or Christian or Jewish extremists. In other words any pro-establishment approach by a Mullah or a fundamentalist is kosher but any revolutionary inclination, which puts constitution and law and order at risk, would be treated as rebellion. This is how scope of religion can be defined in a way that it is limiter to personal sphere and inspirations. Such a paradigm is capable of sticking in the minds of all believers, who value their scripture very highly, including the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews.
This paradigm gives a pluralistic society a decent chance to develop and survive and gives individuals freedom of religion and thought, as long as they are not conspiring against the State, and are her loyal citizens!
An invitation to Speaker Newt Gingrich and his team
I invite Newt Gingrich and his team to study some of our posts under Islamophobia and Sharia Law here please. We have a tab of Sharia Law under the menu of ‘Law and Religion.’ If Gingrich’s election team wants to present correct facts and not one sided propaganda then I invite them to discuss ideas about Muslims, Islam, Sharia etc. with the Muslim Times first, to judge the reasonability of those ideas.
Otherwise, if Newt Gingrich becomes the nominee, the Muslim Times will have no choice but to take full page ads in national newspapers, explaining our position of separation of Mosque-Church and State and this may casue Speaker’s bogeyman to disappear!
Goya’s “Here Comes the Bogey-Man” (Aquí viene el Coco) c.1797
President Obama agrees with the paradigm of Separation of Mosque-Church and State proposed here
He says that we can draw our inspiration from our scriptures but we have to translate the message into a language that is understood by other fellow citizens from different religions.
One of the points President Obama makes is that the scripture has to be translated into a universal message by the believers, one that is befitting the realities of our global village.
To hear President’s Obama’s explanation, click here.
Ignore Gingrich.He wants Christian mullah’s & Jewish support.If he becomes president(God forbid),he will still need Muslim oil.
Newt Gingrich and, in fact, the whole GOP presidential crowd have no clear cut program for the US. They have a vague hope that if they keep their billionaires happy they (the billionaires) might bring prosperity. But they know that with the basic industry gone to the East the billionaires will be content with their earnings abroad. The ordinary folks know that too. So the only hope they have got is in stirring some hate, setting up one group against another and/or finding some way of using the US fire power to get some revenue/support.
Mr. Gingrich is doing just that. The best way of dealing with him and the likes of him is to educate the public about their modus operandi, pointing out that rational and educated approach has always won the day. When Muslims were using the rational approach they devised laws which attracted the attention of Renaissance scholars and the result is that a fair chunk of Islamic legal apparatus is now part of the legal framework of the West.
Muslims also learned it from others and adopted what was according to the general guidelines provided by the Quran and Sunnah. In fact the most modern legal systems and other branches of learning are a shared heritage. If yesterday the West learned from the Islamic law the Muslims stand to learn from the Western legal systems.
A documentary narrated by Speaker Gingrich
Here I quote from the original article from the New York Times:
For Mr. Gingrich, concern about Shariah has been a far more prominent theme. He and his wife, Callista, produced and narrated a 2010 film on the threat from radical Islam, “America at Risk,” that discusses the danger of both terrorism and Shariah against a lurid background of terrorist bombings, bloody victims, wailing sirens and chanting Muslim crowds. (Mrs. Gingrich does say, at one point, “This is not a battle with the majority of Muslims, who are peaceful.”)