Responding to the recent effort to ban Sharia law in some states, Justin Elliot talks to Abed Awad, an attorney who has dealt with cases involving Sharia in the U.S.
In the past 12 years as an attorney, I have handled many cases with an Islamic law component. U.S. courts are required to regularly interpret and apply foreign law -- including Islamic law -- to everything from the recognition of foreign divorces and custody decrees to the validity of marriages, the enforcement of money judgments, probating an Islamic will and the damages element in a commercial dispute. Sharia is relevant in a U.S. court either as a foreign law or as a source of information to understand the expectations of the parties in a dispute.
These sorts of issues involving civil contracts are the only area in which Sharia is likely to matter, and its impact here is indistinguishable from the way Jewish law is recognized in some by courts in the U.S. There's a separate conversation to be had about whether or not consent can truly be said to have been given for some women born into these communities, but I also don't think that caveat applies exclusively to Islamic ones. But it's plainly unconstitutional on its face to pass laws saying people can't practice their religion where it does not conflict with civil law. The U.S. legal system is not going to start recognizing stoning as a legal punishment for adultery simply because someone says their religion justifies it.
Borrowing Matt Yglesias' argument regarding bills seeking to make the killing of abortion providers "justifiable homicide," though, one wonders whether the objective of these bills is reached even if they are declared unconstitutional or if they never pass. The ultimate objective seems to be to mark American Muslims as not merely second-class citizens with fewer rights as everyone else, but as actually dangerous and subversive. Whatever segments of the Republican base didn't believe this before are surely getting the message now that their state lawmakers are deliberately singling out Muslims.
