Outlaw Sharia Law

Wednesday (December 10th) was the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was also the launch day for a campaign concerning the operation of Islamic Sharia courts in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the campaign is to lobby for legislation outlawing the use of religious courts to determine family law and inheritance matters, and to undertake an information campaign informing Muslim women of their family law rights under UK law.


If you support this idea, check out the website Sharia Petition and sign the petition, there are already hundreds of signatures from all over the world, in just a few days.
I read an interesting article which pointed me in the direction of this campaign, from a Dutch site, Sensitive Words. It's a very interesting read, and asks some good questions.


"We had come to the Human Rights Council to join in the fight for the right to talk about religion in public debate. Why, one may wonder, would the right to talk about religion be in peril, at the Human Rights Council of all places? And why would staunch secularists want to stump for it in the first place? Aren’t they the ones who want less, not more, God talk in the public square?


The answer is that the HRC has become the epicenter of a movement by certain Islamic states to curtail freedom of expression, under the guise of stopping ’Islamophobia’ and ’the defamation of religions’. In our present age of cartoon and teddy bear riots, this is perhaps not surprising. What may be shocking to some is that this campaign has gained considerable ground at the United Nations and in some cases, with the blessing of the very agencies that are sworn to uphold universal human rights, the right to freedom of expression being foremost among them.


Since 1999, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)—aided by Russia, China, Cuba, and the so-called non-aligned countries—has made combating the defamation of religions high on the U.N. human rights agenda, advancing resolutions that both decry the outbreak of Islamophobia across the globe and call for the restriction of free expression out of respect for religious belief. In March 2008, during the eighth session of the HRC, the coalition went further to curb expression at the Council itself. The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression was changed so that it now includes policing the world for ’abuses’ of expression that offend religion."


Then in late August, an Abuja, Nigeria, regional meeting (in preparation for the U.N.’s Durban II conference on racism) issued a Declaration that calls on states to „avoid clinging inflexibly to free speech . . . with absolute disregard to religious feeling”. Blasphemy has returned to the world political stage.


These events are part of a larger movement to promulgate a system of Islamized human rights that subordinates rights to a particular interpretation of Sharia’h, or Islamic law. In 1990, OIC member states adopted its own human rights declaration, called the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. While the document steals a phrase or two from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its novel contribution is to limit the guarantees set out in the Universal Declaration by subordinating them to Islamic law."


(To read more about the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, read the full article or check out this wikipedia article. )


"When David Littman and Roy Brown attempted to go before the Council’s eighth session in June 2008 to explore whether such a system is truly compatible with guarantees of universal human rights, they were stopped. Representatives from Egypt, Pakistan and Iran blocked Littman (speaking on behalf of the Association for World Education) from finishing a statement on various forms of violence against women and the use of Shari’ah. He was interrupted on a point of order by the Egyptian Counselor Amr Roshdy Hassan. The representative, joined by his Pakistani counterpart on behalf of the OIC, announced that "Islam will not be crucified in this Council”, and argued that any discussion of Islamic law was an ’insult’ to the faith. After a recess of 45 minutes from what had become a tense interchange—with 16 points of order and a warning by Egypt that if their requirements were not heeded, he would call for a vote - the Council president, Doru Romulus Costea of Romania, returned to comment, "The Council is not prepared to discuss religious questions and we don’t have to do so. Declarations must avoid judgments or evaluation about religion.” ...


... "Far too many on the secular left today believe that the tolerant and free society is one that makes religion, and matters of conscience more broadly, ’private’ matters that have no place in public discourse. Of course this is true and important if it means that matters of conscience ought to be free from coercion and control by government and other power-wielding institutions. Yet private matters are also understood as those that have no place in serious public conversation at all. Unfortunately, this would remove them from serious evaluation and criticism, even when they threaten the values of a secular, open society. I label this mistake The Privacy Fallacy.


The insidious irony of the OIC’s campaign lies in precisely this: on the one hand, they advance an agenda that is hostile to individual freedom and equality, while on the other they appeal to the values of toleration and respect to insulate this agenda from criticism." ...


... "It left me wondering, exactly what does freedom demand of us? What does respect for the freedom of another require of us? Who would be made less free by a discussion of Shari’ah in the Human Rights Council? There is a profound confusion about the meaning of freedom in the soul of the secular left today. I call it the Liberty Fallacy. It begins with the Spinozist principle that the individual conscience must not be coerced by others, whether they be gods, governments, or the despotism of custom. But it goes on mistakenly to conclude that the individual conscience is likewise free from critical evaluation and judgment by others; that because the exercise of conscience is left up to the individual, the truth of its conclusions must be up to the individual as well.


However, contrary to the Liberty Fallacy, people have a right to think what they like, but they do not have a right to be right, and criticism does not amount to violation of a person’s freedom. Indeed, the ultimate affirmation of another person’s freedom is to assume that he does what he does for some reason. His reasons, by their very nature, are such that others can consider them and accept them. But if they are capable of being accepted by others, then they also are capable of being rejected by others.


By consigning conscience to the private realm of the self, the secular left had hoped to shelter the agora from the sometimes toxic effects of faith. Yet paradoxically this privatization can undermine their own attempts to resist religion when it threatens freedom and equality, as in the debate over Islam and human rights. Thankfully, there is a more coherent and useful way to conceive of a secular, open society. Not surprisingly, it can be found in Spinoza.
Spinoza’s case for the free conscience depends not on the subjectivity or privacy of conscience, but on its objectivity and publicity. Conscience cannot be coerced because it flows necessarily from our own assessment of what we have most reason to do, all things considered.


The larger purpose of the protection of conscience is so that the truths of conscience may be shared, in conversation, among persons, as Spinoza himself aspired to do (and achieved, if only posthumously).


For Spinoza, then, matters of conscience are not private but open: open for discussion by others, open to critical evaluation by objective standards, and open to future change. I have characterized conscience as an ’open source’ system, exemplified by the open source movement in computer software design. An open source system is a form of non-hierarchical, collective decision-making in which every proposed solution is open to consideration, criticism, and revision by all, and the process itself is open to anyone whose contributions prove useful for the community of peers. From this perspective, claims about matters of conscience in public life are not just to be tolerated but encouraged. Such conversations may not always be easy or comfortable, but in a free society they are essential. This is liberty’s bottom line." ...


... "Perhaps what will be required is a reinfusion of Spinoza’s confidence in the power of public reason, unaided and unshackled and open: "I confess that from such freedom inconveniences may sometimes arise, but what question was ever settled so wisely that no abuses could possibly spring therefrom? He who seeks to regulate everything by law, is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them.”


A number of human rights and religious groups spoke out powerfully against these concepts. When David Littman took the floor, this time not to invoke Spinoza but the antisemitic writings by the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azar University in Egypt (holding aloft an English translation of large extracts from his, The Children of Israel in the Qur’an and the Sunna), the tolerance of the Egyptian delegate expired again. He objected:


"Here in the Council, we’re here to promote religious freedom. We can discuss religious freedom, but we cannot discuss religion. We cannot discuss the basic tenets of religion. I argue that except for the distinguished representative of the Holy See, nobody in this Council is qualified to discuss theology. . . . Really we should find something more interesting to do in life—like find a hobby or grow a moustache or something.”


Ordered by President Uhomoibhi to desist before completing his statement, Littman stepped away from the microphone, pronouncing, "This is impossible, sir.”