Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 68

Building the Afghan Sharia State

In today's column, I highlight Afghanistan's apostasy prosecution against Said Musa in arguing that the democracy project, our government's experiment in in Islamic nation-building, has failed and that we ought to pull the plug on it. Among other things, I argue:

 The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. “This conflict and country are [theirs] to win,” he wrote, “not mine.”

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. “We are not trying to win this militarily,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last fall. Indeed, the administration had concluded — upon what Ambassador Holbrooke described as consultation with our military commanders — that the war could not be won “militarily.” So the goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to entice them into taking a seat at the table — in the vain hope that if they buy into the political process they will refrain from confederating with the likes of al-Qaeda.

Now I see that Steve Coll is reporting (in the new issue of the New Yorker) that U.S.-Taliban talks are underway:

 Last year, ...  as the U.S.-led Afghan ground war passed its ninth anniversary, and Mullah Omar remained in hiding, presumably in Pakistan, a small number of officials in the Obama Administration—among them the late Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—argued that it was time to try talking to the Taliban again.

Holbrooke’s final diplomatic achievement, it turns out, was to see this advice accepted. The Obama Administration has entered into direct, secret talks with senior Afghan Taliban leaders, several people briefed about the talks told me last week. The discussions are continuing; they are of an exploratory nature and do not yet amount to a peace negotiation. 

How good to know that, to get the Taliban on board, it won't be necessary to change the U.S.-sponsored Afghan constitution a bit.  As my column explains, the nation we're building is already a sharia state. 

Death to Apostates: Not a Perversion of Islam, but Islam

On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying -- not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.

This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted -- against history, law, language, and logic -- that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.

#ad#This is not the first time an apostate in the new American-made Afghanistan has confronted the very real possibility of being put to death by the state. In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness -- after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam?  His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence.

They are right. Under the construction of sharia adopted by the Afghan constitution (namely Hanafi, one of Islam’s classical schools of jurisprudence), apostasy is the gravest offense a Muslim can commit. It is considered treason from the Muslim ummah. The penalty for that is death.

This is the dictate of Mohammed himself. One relevant hadith (from the authoritative Bukhari collection, No. 9.83.17) quotes the prophet as follows: “A Muslim . . . may not be killed except for three reasons: as punishment for murder, for adultery, or for apostasy.” It is true that the hadith says “may,” not “must,” and there is in fact some squabbling among sharia scholars about whether ostracism could be a sufficient sentence, at least if the apostasy is kept secret. Alas, the “may” hadith is not the prophet’s only directive on the matter. There is also No. 9.84.57: “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” That is fairly clear, wouldn’t you say? And as a result, mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality -- spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. It cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and even specifies that non-Muslims are free to perform their religious rites. 

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours -- that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. Nor do the authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo give a hoot that their straightforward interpretation of sharia’s apostasy principles upsets would-be Muslim reformers like Zuhdi Jasser. We may look at Dr. Jasser as a hero -- I do -- but at al-Azhar, the sharia scholars would point out that he is merely a doctor of medicine, not of Islamic jurisprudence.

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy -- no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

#page#To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Need to hear more? The articles creating the Afghan judiciary make higher education in Islamic jurisprudence a sufficient qualification to sit on the Afghan Supreme Court. Judges are expressly required to take an oath, “In the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate,” to “support justice and righteousness in accord with the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” When there is no provision of law that seems to control a controversy, Article 130 directs that decisions be in accordance with “the Hanafi jurisprudence” of sharia.

#ad#Moreover, consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s blueprint for society (highly influential in Sunni Islamic countries and consonant with the transnational-progressive bent of the State Department), the constitution obliges the Afghan government to “create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice” (which, naturally, includes free universal health care). It commands that the Afghan flag be inscribed, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet, and Allah is Great [i.e., Allahu Akbar].” The state is instructed to “devise and implement a unified educational curriculum based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” and to “develop the curriculum of religious subjects on the basis of the Islamic sects existing in Afghanistan.” In addition, the constitution requires the Afghan government to ensure that the family, “a fundamental unit of society,” is supported in the upbringing of children by “the elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam.” Those contrary traditions include Western Judeo-Christian principles.

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban -- that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. “This conflict and country are [theirs] to win,” he wrote, “not mine.”

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. “We are not trying to win this militarily,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last fall. Indeed, the administration had concluded -- upon what Ambassador Holbrooke described as consultation with our military commanders -- that the war could not be won “militarily.” So the goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to entice them into taking a seat at the table -- in the vain hope that if they buy into the political process they will refrain from confederating with the likes of al-Qaeda.

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. Ever since the Iraqis adopted their American-brokered constitution, Christians have left the country in droves, and homosexuals, similarly, have been persecuted. And the Iraqis are so grateful for all the American lives and “investment” sacrificed on their behalf that, just this week, the capital city of Baghdad demanded that the U.S. apologize and fork up another $1 billion in reparations. For what? Why, for “the ugly and destructive way” the American army’s Humvees and fortifications have damaged the city’s aesthetics and infrastructure. Yes, a brief time-out from the usual serenity of life in a sharia state to chastise Americans for their “deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste.”

In 2006, promoters of Islamic democracy -- having dreamed that this chimera was not merely plausible but a boon for U.S. security against terrorists -- were stunned upon awakening to the reality of “democratic” Afghanistan’s intention to execute Abdul Rahman for apostasy. This was an “affront to civilization,” we at NR said at the time. As Samuel Huntington explained, however, there are two senses of "civilization." One assumes that all human beings, all cultures, are essentially the same and share the same concept of the higher form of life -- that there is only one real civilization. The other holds that different cultures have very different ways of looking at the world -- that there are several different civilizations, and what is an affront to one may be a convention to another.

The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of "civilization." As I argued at the time, the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him -- except the one who spat on him. He was thrown in jail as an apostate among 400 Afghan Muslims, and he has since been beaten, mocked, deprived of sleep, derisively referred to as “Jesus Christ,” and sexually abused. And just as no Afghan lawyer was willing to aid an apostate, the Afghan sharia state declined to aid him -- refusing him access to foreign counsel. We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Wisconsin is not the only place sporting a Hitler feel today ...

You can also peruse Tahrir Square in Cairo, where as many as a million Egyptians turned out for the triumphant -- dare we say Khomeini-esque -- return to the homeland of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. He is the sharia compass of the Muslim Brotherhood and, for that matter, millions of Muslims the world over.

As John Rosenthal has been reporting at Pajamas, the anti-Mubarak protesters whom the mainstream media and the Obama administration paint as the vanguard of "democracy," continue to display visceral contempt for Israel and Jews. "Hence," Mr. Rosenthal observes, "the numerous portraits of Mubarak with a Star of David scrawled on his face or forehead," and claims that  the deposed Egyptian president was an Israeli "agent" or "spy" against Egypt. It's shocking, I know, that no one in the legacy media seems particularly interested in these facts and images, but Rosenthal provides them.

Enter Sheikh Qaradawi. The 84-year-old cleric has previously called for the destruction of Israel, endorsed suicide bombing even by women, and expressed a longing to die fighting in the jihad against the Zionist entity. As Robert Spencer recounted at FPM Wednesday in a neat summary of Qaradawi's views, the sheikh explained in a 2009 sermon that "throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler." Yes, according to Qaradawi, it was Allah who decided to sic Hitler on the Jews. The sheikh further implored Allah to "take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers and kill them, down to the very last one."  

These views are widely known and shared in Egypt, where Qaradawi was hailed as a conquering hero at today's massive Juma observance. He fired up the crowd with calls for the conquest of Jerusalem. No transcript yet, but MEMRI has this report.

Three cheers for "democracy"!

One Last Patriot Point

Some reader responses and emailers argue that the GOP defectors should be cut slack because they voted against reauthorization not because they opposed the Patriot Act provisions at issue but to defend the principle that all bills should make time for debate and for proposed amendments, etc. This argument has some cosmetic appeal, especially after the way the Democrats ran Congress from 2007 through 2010. But ultimately, it's unpersuasive in this case.

This was not an attempt to jam a radical and/or voluminous proposal through Congress by some Parliamentary chicanery. We are talking about a short bill dealing with three narrow provisions that are quite familiar to most concerned people. Though they should long ago have been made permanent (or as permanent as any statutory law can be), Patriot's roving wiretap, business records, and lone wolf provisions have been sunsetted repeatedly, resulting in reauthorization debates every few years.

Moreover, there was a fair trade-off here: though amendments were not allowed (the point was to reauthorize old law, not make new law), the three provisions could not pass on a simple majority; a super majority of two-thirds was needed. That's why the bill lost -- it would have been approved easily if only 50 percent plus one had been required. But the point is that a speedy passage was only possible if there was overwhelming consensus. That's reasonable.

This wasn't anything like the healthcare process and similar appalling congressional practices. It is not just that, on Patriot, we've been retreading the same ground for a decade. Anyone who was newly elected to Congress and had been living under a rock before then could have gotten up to speed in about a half-hour by perusing the ABA's Patriot Debates series, which is online and fairly presents both sides of each disputed Patriot provision (and several others that were previously reauthorized, nothwithstanding the caterwauling of civil liberties activists).

The streamlined procedure used was fair, and it made lots of sense if you take the position that Congress should be devoting its finite debate time for urgent matters like the national debt rather than things it has already spent hundreds of hours on. As far as I'm concerned -- for what little that may be worth -- if you voted against reauthorization, it's because you opposed the renewal of these important national security measures. I'm not buying this business about defending the principle of procedural regularity.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The Patriot Act and the Tea Party, continued ...

Our readers' comments on my post from last evening about the (temporary) defeat of reauthorization for three Patriot Act provisions are, as one expects, well informed. I want to respond in particular to Conor Friedersdorf's. He says that, "as usual," I fail "even [to] hint at the reason civil liberties advocates are troubled" by Patriot's roving wiretaps.

I don't know why Mr. Friedersdorf, who almost always makes thoughtful points, so often tees them up in a snide tone. I have a pretty extensive record of writing on the Patriot Act, and an awful lot of it involves addressing the long list of things by which "civil liberties advocates are troubled." I don't expect him to agree with my point of view, and people on the other side have plenty of grist to argue that I've understated the relevant privacy invasions. But to suggest that my practice is to duck or conceal the civil liberties implications is just wrong.

Concerns about "John Doe" warrants -- i.e., roving wiretap authorizations that do not name a specific person or place to be surveilled -- have been discussed since 2001. Two things stand out. First, although we've now had this provision for close to a decade, civil liberties advocates like Mr. Friedersdorf and Cato's Julian Sanchez still have to couch their objections in the subjunctive mood: the warrants "raise the possibility" of overbreadth abuses "disturbingly similar to the 'general warrants'" prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. That is, although the Patriot Act has been examined, debated, and reauthorized a number of times since its initial passage shortly after 9/11, critics still have no concrete record that roving taps have been systematically abused, so they have to raise potential abuses that never seem to materialize. Since all power, not matter how exactingly limited, can be abused, this doesn't get us very far.

Second, note the irony in the civil liberties critique of the Patriot Act: The rule of law, critics say, requires that we interpose courts in national security matters as to which, until the last 30 years or so, they were understood to have neither the requisite political accountability nor institutional competence. Yet, when critics get their wish and courts are interposed, it turns out, we can't trust them either -- they're just rubber stamps who might give the government carte blanche to tap everyone, everyplace, without a showing of cause.

As should have been obvious on its face, and as history elucidates, judges are not going to sign general warrants. The Justice Department and the FBI know that, and are consequently unlikely to propose such warrants (and it's worth pointing out that national security wiretap applications go through a different and more rigorous in-house vetting than criminal wiretap applications). Quite apart from that, however, Mr. Friedersdorf omits mention of the probable cause requirement.

Even if national security agents do not know the precise name of the target of their surveillance application, or the precise location or communications instrument that the target will be using, Patriot bars the judge from issuing the warrant in the absence of probable cause that the target -- who must be described even if agents don't yet know his name -- is an agent of a foreign power. (International terrorist organizations are "foreign powers" and their operatives are "agents" under federal law.) Similarly, the judge may not authorize eavesdropping unless the agents provide probable cause to believe that "each of the facilities or places at which the surveillance is directed is being used or about to be used" by this foreign agent.

These restrictions, coupled with the reluctance of federal judges to authorize searches that run afoul of the Fourth Amendment's ban on general warrants, explain why roving wiretaps have worked well for the last ten years and why the sky has not fallen, as civil liberties advocates predicted it would. Mr. Friedersdorf is correct in claiming that John Doe warrants could "pose a high risk of 'overcollecting' innocent Americans' communications." What he doesn't even hint at (although I won't say "as usual") is the national security concern that delay in seeking authorization until the precise foreign agent can be identified and the precise location and phone are ascertained could result in the loss of vital intelligence -- the information needed to stave off an attack. That is why Mr. Friedersdorf's analogy to law enforcement protocols does not work in this situation. It's not like missing a few calls might result in a kilo of heroin getting onto the street or a mafia hit. In the national security context, missing a few calls might prevent us from stopping a catastrophic attack in which hundreds or thousands of people are killed.  

It's not that I or others on the national security side of the Patriot debate don't appreciate the civil liberties risk. We simply think it must be balanced by the risk to innocent life. We also think the resulting compromise between these concerns in the roving taps provision -- namely, the Patriot Act's probable cause prescriptions, judicial scrutiny, and searching congressional oversight (pivoting off the worthy concerns raised by critics like Mr. Friedersdorf and Cato) -- adequately addresses the civil liberties risk. 

Andrew C. McCarthy

The Patriot Act and the Tea Party

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been on the road for most of the last 10 days.

It's old news at this point that a defection by several Tea Party Republicans to the side of leftwing Democrats resulted in the defeat of reauthorization for three Patriot Act provisions that are soon scheduled to expire. The story may be a case of making a mole hill into a mountain: The reauthorization was brought up on a streamlined procedure that required a supermajority (two-thirds) for passage and it would have prevailed easily on a simple-majority vote; plus, many Tea Partiers (including faves like Michele Bachmann and Allen West) voted in favor. Still, as a small government guy who usually agrees with Tea Party sentiments, I can only conclude that the defectors are either badly misinformed or not thinking this through.

It is a myth perpetuated by the Bush-deranged media that the Patriot Act was a dramatic expansion of federal power and that it unduly infringed on American civil liberties. For the most part, Patriot simply endowed the national security side of the FBI's house with the same powers that had long been exercised by the law-enforcement side. Moreover, Patriot provisions often provided more protection and court oversight than existing law-enforcement procedures.

One of the three provisions in the reauthorization is a good example: the business records provision (which opponents demagogued as the "library records" provision even though library records are not mentioned in it -- though they are covered in its sweep). In a terrorism investigation, Patriot's business records law allows national security agents to go to a court for authorization to compel the production of all sorts of records that might be relevant to a terrorism investigation. By contrast, when I was a prosecutor investigating terrorism as a law-enforcement issue, and I wanted to subpoena exactly the same kinds of information, including library records, I simply reached into my desk drawer for a subpoena, wrote up my demand, and handed it to an FBI agent to serve on the business (or library) in questio. Contrary to Patriot Act procedures, I did not have to apply to a court for permission, and I did not have to certify that the information I was seeking was relevant to some legitimate investigation ... and if the documents demanded were not produced, I could have the custodian of the records jailed for contempt.

Like business records, the two other Patriot provisions at issue mirror the criminal law. Roving wiretaps can only be used with the approval of a judge, and if you are going to target a terrorist or other foreign agent for electronic surveillance at all, it is downright dumb not to get a roving tap because these guys are sophisticated actors who change their phones a lot to defeat surveillance. If we didn't have roving taps, investigators would have to go back to court and get a new eavesdropping order every time that happened. For that reason, law-enforcement agents doing run-of-the-mill drug investigations have had roving tap authority for about 30 years.

The "lone wolf" provision enables national security agents to surveil an operative who appears to be engaged in international terrorism but as to whom there is currently insufficient evidence of his connection to a known foreign terrorist organization -- a pattern that criminal investigators often probe. (Agents frequently learn about what someone is doing before they can nail down whom he is doing it with). 

Here is what I don't understand about the GOP defectors' position. It's not as if refusing to reauthorize the collection of business records, roving wiretaps, and the surveillance of lone wolf terrorists is going to result in any reduction of federal power. It would simply result in a shift from national security law to criminal law as the source of authority to use exactly the same investigative techniques. All Congress would accomplish would be to revert us (at least insofar as these tactics are concerned) to the September 10 approach under which terrorism was considered a mere crime to be addressed by law-enforcement protocols. Effectively, we would be abandoning the post-September 11 approach that has staved off attack by elevating intelligence gathering and prevention over evidence collection and prosecution (usually after people have already been killed). But it's not like the federal government's power to use these tactics would be neutered.

Moreover, I've never understood the Tea Party to stand for the repeal of all federal power. It just wants Leviathan out of the zillion things that should be the purview of either individual choice or, at most, state or local regulation. There's plenty to do on that score when it comes to federal police power -- there are way too many federal crimes and way too much intrusion by federal investigative agencies. The Tea Party GOP members would be doing a real service if, for example, they studied the work Ed Meese has been doing at Heritage on the federalization of what the framers intended to be the prosecutorial functions of the sovereign states.

But national security is one of the few necessary federal obligations. Protecting the homeland from attack by hostile alien forces is the first responsibility of the central government. If you did away with everything else the Justice Department and the FBI do -- got them out of securities regulation, healthcare fraud, organized crime, narcotics enforcement, etc. -- you would still want them to protect the United States from attack by foreign powers, including terrorist organizations. You would still want them scouring records for patterns about what al Qaeda might hit next, tapping the phones of the next Mohamed Atta, and surveilling the next Zacarias Moussaoui until they could find out who he was working for.

Voting against the reauthorization of these essential counterterrorism tools is not striking a blow for limited government. It's mindless preening -- the kind that makes you wonder if some of the people screaming about "first principles" understand what the first principles are.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Bangladesh Today, Egypt Tomorrow

The long-term strategy for enforcing sharia law.

James Clapper issued a clarification last week. Within hours of testifying to Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization, he clarified that he had meant to say the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization. Clapper, the Obama administration’s national intelligence director, did not clue us in on whether he’d been tipped off by the organization’s name or by its motto proclaiming devotion to Islam, Mohammed, the Koran, sharia, and jihad -- the final term being one he may have missed thanks to ongoing government efforts to purge it from our lexicon.

#ad#If Mr. Clapper’s information was a tad off, his timing was even worse. And not just because even giddy Western pundits were occasionally pausing from their dance on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s political grave to admit that the pharaoh’s demise could pave the way for a Brotherhood-led Islamist ascendancy.

What might an Islamist ascendency look like? Consider this: Shortly before Clapper’s faux pas, a ghastly report out of Bangladesh began making the rounds: A 14-year-old girl named Hena had been killed by fewer than 80 lashes of the 100-lash whipping local sharia authorities had ordered her to suffer. It’s difficult to contain one’s anger at the details. Hena had been raped by a 40-year-old Muslim man, described in news accounts as her “relative.” The allegation of rape got the authorities involved, but that turned out to be even worse than the sexual assault itself.

Under sharia, rape cannot be proved absent the testimony of four witnesses. Rapists tend not to bring witnesses along for their attacks. In any event, moreover, sharia values a woman’s testimony as only half that of a man, so the deck is stacked and rape cannot be proved in most cases. Yet that hardly means the report of rape is of no consequence. Unable to establish that she’d been forcibly violated, the teenager became in the eyes of the sharia court a woman who’d had sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Thus the draconian lashing sentence that became a death sentence.

What has that to do with the Muslim Brotherhood? It turns out that these not-so-secular “moderates” spend a great deal of time ruminating on the subject of sharia’s brutal huddud laws -- those prescribing sadistic penalties, such as whippings and stoning, for extramarital fornication, adultery, and homosexuality.

The Brotherhood’s emir for such ruminations is the famed Egyptian sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a sharia scholar who graduated from the storied al-Azhar University. He is probably the ummah’s most influential Islamic cleric -- just ask such admirers as Ground Zero mosque imam Feisal Rauf. Qaradawi is sold as a Muslim modernizer by his many Western fans, particularly the Islamic-studies programs that the Saudis, longtime patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood, pay institutions like Georgetown University to operate. What the academy avoids telling you is that the sheikh, who has endorsed suicide bombings in Israel and the killing of American troops and support personnel in Iraq, also supports female genital mutilation (euphemistically called “circumcision”) as well as sharia standards that discount a woman’s testimony, limit a woman’s inheritance rights to half of a man’s share, and permit men to marry up to four wives (who may, of course, be beaten if they are disobedient).

#page#Qaradawi is also quite opinionated when it comes to the matter of rape. He agrees that a woman must be punished not only if she cannot show that she was the victim of sexual assault, but also if, as they say, she was asking for it. “For her to be absolved from guilt,” he has explained, “a raped woman must have shown good conduct.” If, for example, she has dressed immodestly -- particularly if she has dressed in the Western style -- she is deemed to have brought the attack upon herself.

#ad#To the extent that influential Islamist views about huddud laws are known in the West -- which is not much -- it is a big problem for the Brotherhood. Their motto declares that “the Koran is our law,” and it’s not an empty slogan. The Brothers believe in these behavioral strictures and in the savage penalties meted out for transgressions. That complicates life for an organization struggling to put on a happy, secular face for the West (at least when it’s not writing memos about its “grand jihad” to destroy our civilization from within). Not everyone in America is as desperate to be convinced as our intelligence agencies.

So the more wily Islamists struggle to thread the needle. None is wilier than Tariq Ramadan, grandson of both Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and Said Ramadan, the Brotherhood legend who established its extensive European network. Tariq Ramadan is now free to visit the U.S., the Obama State Department having reversed the Bush administration’s decision to bar him for alleged terror support. In 2005, while this bar was still in effect, Ramadan endeavored to demonstrate his “moderate” credentials by proposing a moratorium on the huddud laws. 

Naturally, there was wild applause from the Clappers in the Western commentariat -- a cheap date if ever there was one. Note, however, that Ramadan was not condemning huddud or calling for its repeal -- just a moratorium. As he framed it, the problem was not sharia but society: The benighted world that is still mired in jahalia, the dark ages before Mohammed. It had not yet seen the wisdom of adopting Islam’s legal system. For Ramadan, the huddud laws themselves were fine; it was just that until countries fully adopted sharia, the conditions would not be in place to assure that huddud would be justly imposed. In the end, the answer for Islamists is always the same: more Islamic law, not less.

Still, it seemed to be a masterstroke of Brotherhood dissembling that would have made his grandfathers proud. It would enable Islamists to appear positively evolved even as they urged adoption of their seventh-century blueprint for society. Except you’ll never guess who wasn’t buying: all those wonderful secular moderates who guide the Brotherhood.

To put it mildly, Qaradawi and his conglomerate of academic and media acolytes went berserk. There were blistering diatribes condemning Ramadan. His proposal was belittled as an “unfounded innovation” that was “juristically baseless” and threatened to sow discord throughout the ummah. That last, by the way, is an extremely serious charge. Sowing discord is often construed as treason, the functional equivalent of public apostasy. The penalty for that under sharia is -- you’ll never guess -- death.

Here’s what you want to remember: Tariq Ramadan is widely revered in Brotherhood circles, for both his heritage and his service to the cause. When he stepped off the sharia reservation, though, that did not stop Qaradawi and the Brothers from slapping him back into his place. You, on the other hand, don’t enjoy a similar reservoir of good will with these alleged secular moderates. You are not an Islamic jurist of legendary standing.

You’re more like Hena. 

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The 'Secular' Muslim Brotherhood

The Obama administration is preparing the political ground for failure in Egypt.

How fitting that it was Juma -- Friday, the Islamic Sabbath day -- that convinced Hosni Mubarak to end his 30-year reign as Egypt’s ruler.

This was only hours after James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, told Congress that Mubarak’s main opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, is “largely secular” in nature. Mr. Clapper was merely echoing the American media, taking pains to brand Egypt’s uprising as secular, democratic, and Islamist-free. It is a narrative divorced from reality. In Egypt, a self-consciously devout Islamic country, nothing is secular and Islamist-free, and therefore nothing is truly democratic, not in the Western sense.

#ad#It is on Juma that Muslims attend weekly communal prayers. Out they then pour from thousands of mosques, with fiery sermons by some of the ummah’s most fundamentalist imams still ringing in their ears. On Thursday night, when Mubarak defiantly said he wasn’t going anywhere, that he would not relinquish all his powers, the throng gathered in Tahrir Square was outraged. Outraged crowds the police state could handle. Crowds inflamed by the imams are a different story. Those would be the crowds on Friday. It was time to go.

So Mubarak is gone. Just as Sadat is gone, and Nasser, and King Farouk, and the Brits. The Brotherhood has outlasted all of them. Time after time, it has been repressed, persecuted, driven underground, and officially banned. The Brotherhood survives and thrives in Egypt because its credo -- “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest objective” -- concisely speaks the sentiments of Islamic Egypt. It survives and thrives throughout the Islamic world because its Salafist ideology admonishes Muslims to take Mohammed, Islam’s warrior prophet, as their guide and to honor the principles of Islam’s founders, the “rightly guided caliphs.”

That is not to say all Muslims agree with the Brotherhood’s call to install strict sharia. Many don’t. It is a disagreement, though, that is perilous to voice. The Brotherhood perceives itself, and is widely perceived, as guardian of the true Islam. If you’re a Muslim, you can rationalize that the Islamists are too retrograde, too literal in their construction of doctrine. In the confines of your mind, you can admire Western thought and the place it reserves in faith for reason -- an attribute on which Islam slammed shut its “gates of Ijtihad” a millennium ago. You can insist, in the silence of your conscience, that while you will take sharia as your private ethical guide, you have no interest in its public program. But you won’t say it aloud.

This is the quandary. If you are a Muslim, from exactly what part of the Brotherhood’s motto would you dissent? Allah obviously is your objective. Mohammed is regarded by your scriptures as the perfect human model to be emulated. Are you going to dissent from sharia, the law of Islam taken straight from the Koran and authoritative accounts of the Prophet’s words and deeds? Or from the imperative of jihad, a divine injunction the scriptures say Allah has elevated over all others?

The Brotherhood’s program -- perhaps sincerely, but certainly shrewdly -- strives for rigorous fidelity to Islam’s origins. That is why the Brothers are so popular with the scholars at al-Azhar University, and why they have been embraced for over a half-century by the rulers of Saudi Arabia -- custodians of Islam’s holiest cities and sites. Even for a Muslim who privately believes the Brothers are a menace, publicly saying so is fraught with risk. This is especially so when one considers that, for Muslims, treason -- sowing discord within the ummah -- is considered apostasy, the gravest sin in Islam and one for which the penalty is death.

It is an act of great courage for a Muslim to oppose the Brotherhood openly. Personal, tacit dissent is one thing -- the common thing. But the Brothers have effectively taken on the mantel of Islam itself. Even those many who would deny it to them have a hard time saying why publicly.

#page#Much of what inspired Hassan al-Banna to create the Brotherhood in 1928 was rage over the purging of Islam from public life in Turkey. Muslims the world over were horrified by Kemal Atatürk’s dismantling of the Caliphate -- even though it was by then an empty shell, bereft of any but symbolic value. Just as the Brotherhood has outlasted its Egyptian oppressors, however, Banna’s vision has prevailed over Atatürk’s. Each day, the regime in Turkey, a strong ally of the Brotherhood’s, moves the country deeper into the Islamist fold. In an overwhelmingly Muslim country, the pull of the Brotherhood’s ideology remained powerful, even through an 80-year secularization project.

Now, Mubarak is gone. And with President Obama’s penchant for both engaging Islamist organizations in the U.S. and indulging even the ruthless Islamist leaders in Tehran, the Brotherhood knows the current administration won’t dare use the lush U.S. financial support of Egypt as leverage to deny the Brotherhood a powerful role in the new government.

#ad#Nobody knows this better than James Clapper. He cannot possibly believe the Brotherhood is secular. He can believe only that you can be duped into thinking the Brotherhood is secular. The administration has to do something because, in Egypt, a Brotherhood-influenced government is now inevitable. And we’ve seen in Turkey how Brotherhood-influenced becomes Brotherhood-dominated in short order.

The Obama administration is preparing the political ground for failure.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

There's Willful Blindness, and Then There's Willful Stupidity

James Clapper, the head of intelligence for the United States of America, has explained to Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is "largely secular." It further has "eschewed violence," decries al-Qaeda as a "perversion of Islam," and really just wants "social ends" and "a betterment of the political order in Egypt."

I kid you not.

This is the Muslim Brotherhood whose motto brays that the Koran is its law and jihad is its way. The MB whose Palestinian branch, the terrorist organization Hamas, was created for the specific purpose of destroying Israel -- the goal its charter says is a religious obligation. It is the organization dedicated to the establishment of Islamicized societies and, ultimately, a global caliphate. It is an organization whose leadership says al-Qaeda's emir, Osama bin Laden, is an honorable jihad warrior who was "close to Allah on high" in "resisting the occupation." The same leader who insists that "the history of freedom is written not in ink [i.e., constitutions] but in blood [i.e., jihad]."

If this is what $40 billion–plus buys you, maybe Representative Ryan can make up the rest of that $100 billion by eliminating the intelligence community.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Mythical Sharia Strikes Again

Read it and weep -- and you will want to weep. In Bangladesh a 14-year-old girl named Hena was raped by a 40-year-old man, Mahbub, who is described in a report as her "relative." [Thanks to John Hinderaker for highlighting this story.] Apparently -- the report is not clear on how this happened -- the matter was brought to the attention of the sharia authorities in her village of Shariatpur. You'd think this was a good thing ... except, in Islam, rape cannot be proved absent four witnesses -- i.e., it's virtually impossible to establish that what happened happened. That's a dangerous thing for the victim -- deadly dangerous in this instance -- because if she has had sexual relations outside marriage but cannot prove she has been raped, she is deemed to have committed a grave sin. In Hena's case, the sharia authorities ordered that she be given 100 lashes. The young girl never made it through 80; she fell unconscious and died from the whipping.

When I catalogue the horrors of sharia, I frequently hear in response that I am oversimplifying it, that I am relying on incorrect interpretations (oddly said to be inaccurate because they construe Islamic doctrine "too literally"), or that I fail to appreciate the richness and nuances of sharia jurisprudence that have made it possible for moderate Muslims to evolve away from the law's harshness. Some even claim sharia is not a concrete body of law, just a set of  aspirational guidelines -- as if Sakineh Ashtiani, the woman sentenced by an Iranian court to death by stoning, will merely be having advice, rather than rocks, thrown at her.

These criticisms miss the point. I don't purport to have apodictic knowledge of what the "true" Islam holds -- or even to know whether there is a single true Islam (as I've said a number of times, I doubt that there is). But that's irrelevant. It should by now be undeniable that there is an interpretation of sharia that affirms all its atrocious elements, and that this interpretation is not a fringe construction. It is mainstream and backed by very influential scholars who know a hell of a lot more about Islam than we in the West do. That makes it extremely unlikely that this interpretation will be marginalized any time soon. There is no agreed-upon hierarchical authority in Islam that can authoritatively pronounce that various beliefs and practices are heretical. The closest thing Muslims have is the faculty at al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is a big part of the problem. Whether this fundamentalist interpretation is accepted by only 20 or 30 percent of Muslims -- or whether, as I believe, the percentage is higher, perhaps much higher -- that still makes it the belief system of almost half a billion people worldwide. That's not a fringe.

Sharia is not a myth or an invention of overwrought Islamophobes. It is very real. And that some Saudi-endowed Georgetown prof will inevitably come up with some elegant explanation of how the village authorities got it wrong will have absolutely zero influence over the way sharia is understood in Shariatpur. Nor will not make this tormented 14-year-old girl any less dead.

Andrew C. McCarthy