Upsetting the Natural Order

 It belongs to non-modern religion to believe two things: 

1. To believe that religious behavior and belief is a constituent of the natural order.
2. To believe that religion and belief are part of the framework that holds up the natural order.

In its most primal form religion taught that a people's rituals and beliefs both existed from the beginning and were somehow necessary for the annual return of the rains, or the migration of the herds and flocks, or the changing of the seasons. 

The major religions in our contemporary world no longer assert that the natural order is upheld by their rituals. But there is a strong belief within Islam, Christianity, and Judaism that the moral order of our social world is dependent on religious belief and practice. This is easy enough to see in the now common trope asserting that everything went wrong with US morality when prayer was taken out of public schools. Or in an older Catholic teaching characterized by the short novel Mr Blue by Myles Connolly, which imagines that the future of society hinges on a single celebration of the Eucharist. Supporters of the Tridentine Mass appear to concur. 

What we need to notice here isn't the kind of pious assertions of First Things intellectuals, their traditionalist Protestant sympathizers, or their various Muslim counterparts. It is just how high the stakes have been raised in the question of religion and the social order. Holders of this belief in the causative relationship between right religion and the social order are asserting that any attack on true religion is an attack on the entire social order and invites nothing but social chaos. 

It is in this often mild-mannered assertion that we find the real roots of radicalism and violence. When we believe that failure to conform to our religious ideal isn't just a poor personal choice, but a direct attack on the social and moral order that provides for our life and well-being, then violence is inevitable. We've created a zero-sum game that allows only for retreat into some religious redoubt from the chaos outside or an all out counter-attack to destroy the enemy of all that is good. 

Which is why ISIS launched yet another sectarian attack against Shi'ites in Peshawar just yesterday, March 7th, 2022. In the understanding of Islam found broadly among the group called Islamists it is believed that the moral and social order of humanity depends on the propagation of Islamic teaching. Shi'ite belief and practice varies from this teaching in ways that for Islamists undermines the entire mission of Islam and indeed the future of humanity. So when all else fails violence is the only option. 

It may seem churlish to compare Conservative Christians with ISIS, but only if we forget how much violence has been begotten in the name of purging Christianity of its defects and the world of its opponents for the sake of upholding the moral order of the universe. Christians didn't go out of the business of religious war and killing heretics (if we ever left it) because we somehow rediscovered Jesus' teaching 1800 years after his birth. We were put out of business by a growing secular society that wouldn't tolerate such nonsense and justifiably wanted to put, and keep religion in its place. Modernity had its own violent follies to explore. 

And it is nonsense. Religious teaching may inspire, and religious ritual underscore, the best of human values. Religious revelation may indeed inspire us from the Transcendent to see ourselves and our world in new ways. But in no way is the natural or moral order of the universe dependent on such revelation, teaching or ritual. The universe is too big, and humanity too varied and complex, for our current moral evolution to be dependent upon any one religion or indeed all religions combined. This doesn't make religion irrelevant. It just makes it a part, and a part only, of God's providence for creation and it's creatures. 

Religious violence is rooted in the claim that religion is more than God intended it to be. Indeed it is rooted in the religious assertion that our world depends on religion rather than God. So long as this persists we'll have religious bullies asserting themselves against the dreaded heretics of their own fold, swinging out their elbows to claim a right to public power, or whining defensively that secular society never really understood their good intentions. The upshot will be a continued decline in all such religion, with which God will manage and still extend God's love and care for creation and humanity just fine. 

Sharia and the Modern World

 On February 16, 2022, the Washington Post ran an article explaining how a man who had murdered his sister in an honor killing was released from prison because his family forgave him. This was not only acceptable but required under Pakistani interpretation of Islamic law. How can such a thing possibly happen?

One of the most obvious things about classical Islamic law is that it regards the family as the fundamental social unit. This was innovative in breaking down tribalism, but created a new set of problems. In classical Sharia crimes like murder are regarded as primarily offenses against a family (and God), not the whole of society and not necessarily against an individual. But it isn’t just murder. This is also true of laws governing things like marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. In Islamic law all of these are matters between families, not merely individual men and women and even less the ruling authorities.

In the specific case of murder it is (apart from God) the family of the victim whose rights have been violated and thus it is the family which must be satisfied that justice is done. For much of Islamic history it would be the family that was responsible for carrying out any punishment; including the death penalty. Or, as in recent cases in the United Arab Emirates, the family could accept a payment from the murderer or his family in lieu of other punishment. In the case reported by the Washington post the family is both the family of the murder victim and the murderer. So the family could choose to simply forgive the murderer.

This idea that the family is the primary interested party in a crime is contrary to all modern sensibilities. In the United States we have seen numerous cases in recent years where families forgave a murderer. But such forgiveness plays no role in determining punishment. In the modern world murder isn't a private matter. It is a crime against the entire social order that exists to protect human lives. Murder isn’t a crime against the family of the victim, it’s a crime against all of us And it is a crime against the law that represents our interests. 

In short Shari’a, like all traditional religious laws, is built on a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be human in society than that which is at the foundation of the modern nation-state. 

This isn’t the only difference between Sharia  and modern law. Sharia law is divided into two parts: laws concerning the rights of human beings and relationships between humans, and laws concerning the rights of God in relationship to human beings. Thus in Sharia law blasphemy, apostasy, and abandoning Islam are illegal. They are violations of the rights of God. 

In modern legal thinking God has no rights that human governments are obliged to respect or enforce. Religious acts and attitudes cannot and should not be criminalized. Religion has no claim in the realm of either civil or criminal law in the modern state. But under classical Sharia the state is obliged to enforce the rights of God.

Pakistan, like many Muslim countries,  has a hybrid system of law that tries to accommodate both modern laws and Sharia law. As the case reported in the Washington Post demonstrates, the efforts to create a hybrid system have been an abject failure. This is because modern states are unified primarily by a common system of law. You can have a multicultural state and society. You can have a multi-religious state and society. But you cannot have a multi-legal state or society or there will simply be chaos. And chaos is the defining characteristic of those states which try to have both modern laws and Sharia law, or for that matter modern laws and Christian law, modern laws and Jewish law, or modern laws and Hindu law. 

Back in Pakistan the problem of the murderer being forgiven by his family and released from prison predictably brought howls of protest from human rights group within and outside Pakistan. In particular women’s rights groups were outraged. The outrage simply shows that Pakistani society is divided. Modern Pakistanis cannot live with laws based on a pre-modern worldview. But many Muslim Pakistanis cannot live with modern laws that do not recognize the rights of families to their honor, and God to God's singular demand for obedience. 

But again, the problem is not unique to the Muslim world. It is a problem that divides Israeli Society, which also has two sets of laws: one religious and one secular; and in which some Jews demand that their religious law supersedes secular law. It happens in the United States when religious people claim a right to ignore the laws designed to protect the public health and welfare and demand that the law support their religious ideology. Indeed the same problem exists in every country a where religious believers insist that the state not merely give them freedom of religion, but actually support their religious beliefs, values, and practices. 

It happens that it is within the Muslim world that the conflict between religious law and modern law is most acute, simply because the creation of modern states is such a recent development in the Muslim world. But seeing events in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world shouldn't just result in condemnation of clear abuses of human rights. We should also look at ourselves, and realize how easily the chaos of conflicting laws can happen even here.