God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

Irrational fantasies about a Muslim threat in the contemporary United States emerge in many ways. For example, between 2010 and 2018, forty-three states introduced 201 bills aimed at banning sharia law as a looming danger to the West. Of course, Selim’s post-1517 reform of sharia courts never entered these discussions. If it had, perhaps state legislators would have come to understand that the overwhelming majority of the resolutions in the millions of cases adjudicated in sharia courts over the centuries have had next to nothing to do with sharia law—either the real law itself or their caricature of it. Perhaps they would have learned that Islamic courts served Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and that Christians and Jews often preferred the Islamic court to their own. Taking a comparative perspective, they might have discerned that sharia courts in Selim’s day provided more rights to religious minorities, especially to women in the realm of family law, than did Christian courts in Europe.