How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

All Western political theory places the individual in a social contract with the sovereign, just as biblical religion locates the individual in a covenant with God. The “inalienable rights” of the American Founding derive from a God who grants such rights to every individual by eternal covenant: no king, petty official, or family member can impair them. Islam’s legal system is closer to the pagan model of ancient Rome: the paterfamilias is a “governor” or “administrator” of the family, a miniature sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife. Wife-beating is practiced widely in the Muslim world as well as among Muslim immigrant communities in the West. It is embedded too profoundly in sharia law to be extracted. Nowhere to my knowledge has a Muslim religious authority of standing repudiated wife-beating as specified in Sura 4:34 of the Koran. To do so would undermine the foundations of Muslim society.