What is sharia'h, where does it come from and why does it matter so much

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/07/brussels-2012-prof-hans-jansens-speech.html

Thursday, July 12, 2012 

Brussels 2012: Prof. Hans Jansen’s Speech

Prof. Dr. Johannes J.G. Jansen (Amsterdam 1942) was Houtsma professor for Contemporary Islamic Thought in the Department of Arabic, Persian and Turkish at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) from 2003 till his retirement in 2008.

Dr. Jansen taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at Leiden University from 1982 till May 2005. From early 1979 till the summer of 1982 he was director of the Dutch research center in Cairo, the Nederlands Instituut voor Arabische Studiën en Egyptische Archeologie. He also taught at Groningen University (1975-1979) and at Amsterdam University (1982).

He studied in Amsterdam (1960-1964), Cairo (1966-1967) and Leiden (1964-1968). He received degrees from the Theological Faculty of Amsterdam University (Biblical Hebrew and the History of Philosophy, 1961), the Amsterdam University Faculty of Arts (BA, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, 1964) and the Leiden Faculty of Arts (MA, Arabic, Turkish, and History of the Middle East). He received a doctorate at Leiden in 1974. In Dutch he writes as ‘Hans Jansen’. In 2010 and 2011 he was witness for the defense in the trial against Geert Wilders. See also: www.arabistjansen.nl

Hans Jansen speaks at the Brussels Conference July 9 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q8CNH3yiEUA

Excerpts: The Islamic sharia'h is a system of law. It is a compilation of prohibitions, admonitions, and commands about human behavior. The sharia'h is not an internal matter, it only concerns Islam and Moslems. It includes a large number of provisions about people who are no Moslems.  These rules are usually prohibitions that carry severe penalties if violated.  These provisions of sharia'h makes life unsafe and uncertain for someone who lives under shari'ah law and who is not a Moslem. 

Under sharia'a for someone who is not a Moslem has no rights. The prisoners in Guantanamo Bay prison have more rights than a Jew or a Christian who lives under sharia'h law.

Unlike the legal systems of most modern nation states, sharia'h law is not subject to democratic supervision. Like international law or rabbinic law, sharia'h is an academic affair, experts discuss and debate rules until reaching an agreement.

Sharia'h does not acknowledge parliament or government that acts as legislator; but the rules of the sharia'h come into being by being agreed upon by experts, that is the Islamic religion leaders, the professional Moslems, ayatollahs or other dignitaries.

The way Islamic law come into being is undemocratic. This implies that allowing sharia'h or even part of it to be the law of the land of a western nation will diminish the democratic character of that nation. It means giving away legislative power to unelected, self appointed men who are unknown and anonymous and operate from far away mosques from Afghanistan or Pakistan.  In a democracy this is not the ideal relations.

This is worst than taxation without presentation, it is legislation without presentation.

Western policy makers do not take sharia'h law too seriously because it is academic and religious affair. Western policy makers do not have much respect for such system because they see it as a system of law that springs not from the power of the state rather from the minds of religious scholars.

In the Moslem world, on the contrary, the authority of sharia'h is overwhelming, identified as the will of God and the sharia'h specialists are the religious leaders of the Moslem community. No government in the Islamic world can afford to alienate these specialists of sharia'h law if it wants to stay in power.

Each and every Islamic country nurtures its own equilibrium between its government and its religious specialists. Most Islamic countries posses legal systems that are influenced by, but not identical with the traditional sharia'h law. To the leaders of the radical Islamic movements, that no identity of national law and sharia'h law is permanent source of anger and the smallest dispute between sharia'h law and the law of the land is a permanent fuel to the fire of their propaganda machine. Since such a discrepancy supplies proof that a human law maker wants to take the place of God and that is blasphemy. God must remain the only law giver.

Sharia'h law is not a practical system of law developed in course; it is the product of the deliberations of scholars and it does not spring from practical concerns of judges, barristers, prosecutors, defenders, consequently, is poor on procedure, it is a theoretical, abstract system of laws, and this explains most of its faults. Nevertheless, Moslem theology claims that sharia'h law is divine. If unfamiliar new questions arise, for which sharia;h has no answers, sharia'h specialists, at least in theory, will come up with a solution that is based on the four principles and rules of sharia'h, that are the Qur'an, the Hadith, the knowledge and agreement. The fourth root, the agreement and consensus is for all practical purposes the most important criterion. Once a consensus has emerged, it become unnecessary to consult all other sources; theory and theology attach the greatest value to the authority of the first four principles, the Qur'an, but in practice, the wording of Qur'an many have to be supplemented, or interpreted, by other sources or by other passages from the Qur'an itself.

Her we meet with important principle of sharia'h law, abrogation, nasch in Arabic, whereby initial passing of a lw can be abrogated in a later stage and another law to take its place.

Whatever problem sharia'h scholars are confronted with, in few generation they will work out an agreement and that Mohamed directive advice that Allah will not permit this community to agree on an edict and this directive plays a central role in the sharia'h system, it application has a number of unforeseen applications. Abolishing the sharia'h recommendation on which agreement has been reached implies that Mohamed's ummah-nation-community did go wrong but according to Islam's prophet, it did not. Hence, it is out of the question to back on regulations once they are agreed upon. 

According to Islam, flexible laws are not humane bit dangerous since citizens do not know  what they can be arrested and executed for. 

Islamic law as flexible it is reported to be is unanimous on a large number of points, agreements, consensuses, that the system is built upon. No important disagreement exist on the points of law that are important to whoever is a non-Moslem, whatever the friends of Islam may say to the contrary.

When we are concern ourselves against the onslaught of Islam, we must concentrate on the sharia'h not Qur'an or Mohamed.

The power that Islamic sharia'h experts exercise over the people is amazing and has no equal in history. It is based on social pressure. The Islamic clergy exercises the final authority on which behavior constitutes Islamic behavior.

This would not matter to us if Islam did not boast to be able and their willing to destroy the West. In order to defend the West against Islam it is chain that is granting prestige and authority that has to be attacked and this attack is better take point ay its weakest point, the basis of the authority of the clergy. And this clergy authority is based on sharia'h.  However, the authority of sharia'h implies that Mohamed the prophet of Islam was more or less a simpleton and that Qur'an is a simplistic piece of pious prose that lectures that man needs to be saved from the fire of Hell and only the Islamic clergy knows how a man could be saved and this is by virtue of their knowledge of the sharia'h, and not their virtue of their knowledge of the Qur'an.

In advent of the sharia'h in the road of Islam we might argue it can only be understood as a belittlement to the Qur'an and Mohamed. Once we can make Moslems understand this it may influence them.

The question we need to ask, as soon as an appeal to a sharia'h law is being made what do Moslem scholars, all of them human, not prophets, know more than Mohamed?  It is best to try influence Moslems to realize that over the centuries an ever widening gap has opened up between do they sincerely and sometimes naively see Islam and the accumulated prescripts the clergy want to see applied. 

We should ask Moslems, again and again, what the human lectures of the sharia'h and books knew more than that arch angel Gabriel when he revealed the Qur'an to Mohamed.

The Qur'an bring bad news to someone who does not want to submit to Islam. But as explicit as the sharia'h it is not.  

Though simply human, the writers of the sharia'h books claim to know more than all the prophets and arch angels combine.

To remain free from sharia'h law we may, eventually have to fight. But then we must also understand that freedom is not for free.