Hassan Awaisi is either willfully dishonest in his apology for Shariah law (“True Shariah law condemns violence,” Nov. 28, p. 6) or ignorant of the basic tenets of his faith. His claim that Shariah defends “the rights of all citizens, regardless of sex, race, creed or faith” is contradicted by the experience of Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Jews across the Muslim world, as well as by the letter of Islamic doctrine itself. Was Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran “hijacking” Islam when he issued a death warrant for the author Salman Rushdie? Was the sentencing of the raped “Qatif girl” to 200 lashes a miscarriage of Islamic justice? Of course not. In both cases Islamic law was being applied in the way it was always meant to be: In the first case, as a sanction for the murder of apostates, and in the second, as the condign punishment for adultery – forced or consensual.

Of course, the same punishment and much worse is commonly meted out to women in the Islamic world. The fault lies not with the foreign policy of the Bush administration but with the persistence of a law code that counts the testimony of women as half that of man’s and with Muslims in the West who, like Awaisi, wishfully prefer to view the barbarity of legal rulings in Saudi Arabia and other countries as deviations from Islam, rather than as the truest embodiments of it.

Stefan Eilts

CAS ’08