This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/4954
May 20, 2011
The importance of the Shari'a component in this move can't be underestimated. As Dr. Bernard Lewis stated in his 2007 [interestingly archived at the MB website] AEI sponsored Irving Kristol lecture. Referring to the centrality of Islam and Shari'a in Muslim life, Mr. Lewis said, "Here I would remind you that we are dealing not only with a different religion but also with a different concept of what religion is about, referring especially to what Muslims call the shari`a, the holy law of Islam, covering a wide range of matters regarded as secular in the Christian world even during the medieval period, but certainly in what some call the post-Christian era of the Western world..." Further defining the all-encompassing nature of Shari'a, Lewis states, "I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion. For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things--marriage, divorce, and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to express it..." [source, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=15399&ref=search.php] As heretofore mentioned, the role of Al-Azhar university has been, for a millennium, to train Sunni imams. In the 20th century it became commonplace for American imams to be selected upon recommendations from abroad, often from the ilk of Al-Azhar graduates.
To gauge the nature of Shata's brand of Islam, please refer to the following sermon entitled, "Why they hate Islam," during which he demonstrates Islam's triumphalism and casts the "battle" between believers and non-believers as one between good and evil.
One can immediately grasp from the imam's exegesis, the Al-Azhar hard-line, Islam is intended to be the dominant world religion and the battle to establish it is a war of good versus evil that will be fought until "judgment day." We suggest, that if the intended "reforms" at Al-Azhar proposed by the MB come to fruition, one of the effects down the line will be to further radicalize American imams, thereby hastening the effort to make the U.S. a shari'a compliant nation. That such a development would be detrimental in the extreme, to the maintenance of a republican form of government is axiomatic. ©2011 PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved. |
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=mbsharia5182011101%2Ehtm |
This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/4954