Canon Law vs Sharia Law

Canon Law Runs a Church. Sharia Wants the Country.

The debate over canon law versus sharia law took center stage this week after Jesse Watters interviewed Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. Most Americans know little about either system, and even less about how to debate them honestly.

Some Muslim politicians use that comparison to treat sharia as harmless private faith, even as political Islam pushes it further into public life wherever its numbers grow.

People keep saying sharia is just “Muslim canon law.” That sounds fair. It is not. It could not be further from the truth.

Canon law is the Catholic Church’s internal rulebook. It tells the Church how to run itself: priests, sacraments, marriage cases, church discipline. If you break it, the worst the Church can do is cut a person off from sacraments and office. It cannot jail a Baptist, tax a Jew, or rewrite the criminal code for a Hindu neighbor. Catholics are expected to obey the civil law of their country. Canon law is church order. It is not the government.

Sharia is different. In its classical form, it is not a parish handbook. It is presented as Allah’s law for prayer, family, money, crime, and public life. In America and the West, many Muslims say it is personal faith. In other Islamic countries around the world, it is not personal. In Muslim majority countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan, sharia is woven into the state. When that happens, it does not stop at the mosque door. It reaches the courtroom, the inheritance table, the apostate, the critic, and often the non-Muslim.

That is the contrast that matters for society.

Canon law does not assign Christians a superior civic status over Jews, atheists, or Muslims. A Methodist in Detroit does not live under Vatican statutes. Classical Islamic jurisprudence, by contrast, developed a political theology in which the community of Muslims is the normal subject of the law and non-Muslims live under a protected but unequal status historically known as dhimma: tolerated, taxed, and restricted in public religion. Modern nation-states have mostly abandoned the old poll tax, but the older architecture still shows up wherever blasphemy laws, apostasy rules, limits on church-building, unequal inheritance, or family-law disabilities follow a person because of creed.

Freedom of religion in the American sense includes the freedom to leave a faith, criticize it, marry across its boundaries, and live as an unbeliever without losing civil standing. Sharia treats leaving Islam as apostasy. As of recent counts, a group of Muslim-majority countries still make apostasy a capital or otherwise severe offense; others punish blasphemy in ways that fall hardest on religious minorities. One may not pretend they are the equivalent of a diocesan marriage tribunal.

None of this requires pretending that every Muslim wants a theocratic state. However worldwide, Pew found that support for making sharia “the official law of the land” ranges from near-unanimity in Muslim majority countries to minorities in parts of Central Asia and Europe where Muslims do not have the majority yet, but their numbers are rising. The issue is not the private believer. The issue is the claim that Allah’s law should be the state’s law.

The American settlement is almost the opposite of that claim. The Constitution creates a government of enumerated powers, equal citizenship, due process, and no religious test for office. The First Amendment bars an established national church and protects free exercise. Sovereignty rests with the people under law, not with a clerical class reading revelation into criminal statutes.

A constitution that forbids religious tests cannot coexist with a system that makes office, testimony, conversion, or public speech turn on Islamic status. A constitution that protects the free exercise of religion cannot coexist with a rule that leaving Islam is a crime. Equal protection cannot coexist with a family-law regime that assigns men and women, or Muslims and non-Muslims, different civic weights as a matter of religious duty.

Jewish law is demanding. It is not the Constitution. Jews made it compatible with America because of a simple rule: the law of the land is the law. Keep your faith. Do not replace the republic with a religious court for everybody else. That is also how canon law works here. The synagogue and the church may bind their own. They do not force their ideology on the rest of the country.

America took in Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, and later many other faiths. The line that held is this: no religion becomes the civil constitution. You may live your faith. You may not make it the criminal law of your neighbor.

Political Islam breaks that line. It does not just ask for a seat at the table. In its consistent form, it says man’s constitution is invalid when it contradicts Allah’s law. That is not the same as a parish rulebook. A free country can welcome Muslims as citizens under one Constitution. It cannot pretend a system built to govern worship, family, crime, and nonbelievers is harmless church policy.

If Muslims want to live under sharia law, they should consider immigrating to other Muslims countries. In America we have one constitution for all Americans regardless of faith

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