Source: The Washington Post
At a campaign stop in Fort Dodge, Iowa, this week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was asked about keeping sharia law out of the United States. “Guys,” he replied, according to the New York Times’s Jeremy Peters, “that’s not going to happen.”
That question, or some variant thereof, has regularly been part of the political conversation in the United States for several years now. The idea that there will be a formal or informal shift in the country to sharia law — generally understood to be a system of restrictive legal guidelines used by Muslims — has gripped a segment of the electorate (mostly on the conservative side) and prompted political responses.
Rubio dismisses the idea that there would be some sort of transition to the theoretical precepts of sharia, no doubt in part because the United States has a well-defined legal structure already in place. But why was it even asked? How did the idea trickle down to a random voter in Iowa?
In May 1997, Newt Gingrich, then House speaker, argued from the chamber floor that the persecution of Christians around the world was “one of today’s overlooked tragedies.” He entered into the record a column from the Times’s A. M. Rosenthal the month before. Rosenthal wrote about persecution of Christians in Asia and Africa, isolating the effort to mandate Islamic law in some places.
Categories: American History, Americas, Sharia