Does Islam itself promote hostility for and violence against non-Muslims, or are all the difficulties between the West and Islam based on secondary factors such as “radical” interpretations of Islam, economics, and other grievances?

This is the fundamental question.

Obviously, if “anti-infidel” hostility is inherent to Islam itself, then the conflict becomes existential — a true clash of civilizations with no easy fixes and lots of ugly implications along the horizon. Because of this truism, those who whitewash Islam’s image in the West insist on the opposite: that current difficulties are temporal, and not rooted to innate Islamic teachings.

Enter Shariah: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-authored by John Esposito and Natana J. Delong-Bas. The authors’ goal is to exonerate Sharia — which they portray as enshrining “the common good (maslahah), human dignity, social justice, and the centrality of the community” — from Western criticism or fear, which they claim is based solely on “myth” and “sensationalism.”

In their introductory chapters, they define Sharia as being built upon the words of the Koran and the Sunna (“example”) of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as contained in sahih (canonical) hadiths. They add:

Shariah and Islamic law are not the same thing. The distinction between divine law (Shariah) and its human interpretation, application, and development (Islamic law) is important to keep in mind throughout this book … Whereas Shariah is immutable and infallible, Islamic law (fiqh) is fallible and changeable.

Next, the authors highlight how important Sharia is to a majority of Muslims. They cite a 2013 Pew Poll which found that 69% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, 73% in South Asia, and 55% in Central Asia believe that “Sharia is God’s [Allah’s] divine revelation.”

Pew found that even larger numbers “favored the establishment of Shariah as official law”: 99% in Afghanistan, 84% in South Asia, 74% in the Middle East and North Africa, and 64% in sub-Saharan Africa.

So far so good: The authors’ introductory claim (that Sharia is fundamental to Islam) and statistics (that hundreds of millions of Muslims revere Sharia and wish to see it implemented) are correct.

Now, the aforementioned question: Is Sharia itself behind the intolerance, misogyny, violence, and terrorism committed in the name of Islam?

Here, the hitherto objective authors shift gears and take on the mantle of apologists. Their thesis is simple: Any and all negative activities Muslims engage in are to be blamed on anything and everything — as long as it’s not Sharia.

In order to support this otherwise unsupportable position, and as might be expected, the remainder of the book consists of obfuscation, dissembling, and lots and lots of contextual omissions and historical distortions. A small sampling follows.

Sharia regarding women

The authors quote and discuss at length many Koran verses about women that seem positive (Koran 30:21, 3:195, and 2:187), without alluding to counter verses that, say, permit husbands to beat their wives (4:34) and treat them as “fields” to be “plowed however you wish” (2:223). Nor do they deal with Muhammad’s assertions that women are “lacking in intelligence” and will form the bulk of hell’s denizens, as recounted in canonical hadith.

They partially quote Koran 4:3: “[M]arry those that please you of other women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then marry only one.” This suits the authors’ purpose, which is to present the Koran as implicitly recommending only one wife, since it acknowledges the near-impossibility for a man to treat all wives equally.

Yet the authors deliberately left out the continuation of Koran 4:3. Perhaps because it permits Muslim men to copulate with an unlimited number of sex slaves (ma malakat aymanukum), even if the men are married.

Esposito and Delong-Bas also dissemble about child marriage, saying “classical Islamic law” permits it, but only when “the child reaches a mature age.”

Yet they make no mention that, based on Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha — that is, based on his Sunna, which is immutable and part of Sharia — this means nine is considered a “mature age.”

Freedom of religion and non-Muslims

The authors claim that “[t]here are more than 100 Quranic verses that … affirm freedom of religion and conscience.” They quote many at length, and then assert: “The guiding Shariah principle … underscored by Quran 3:28, 29:46, and 60:89, is that believers should treat unbelievers decently and equitably as long as the unbelievers do not behave aggressively.”

Yet they fail to mention or sideline the many contradictory verses that call for relentless war on non-Muslims — who are further likened to dumb cattle in Koran 25:44 — until they surrender, one way or another, to Islam (e.g., 8:39, 9:5, 9:29). They also fail to quote the verses that form the highly divisive doctrine of al-wala’ w’al bara’ (“Loyalty and Enmity”). This includes Koran 5:51, which forbids Muslims from befriending Jews and Christians. And Koran 60:4, which commands Muslims to harbor only “hate” for non-Muslims, until they “believe in Allah alone.”

Needless to say, they also ignore Koran 3:28, which permits Muslims to feign friendship for non-Muslims whenever the former are under the latter’s authority. (Such is the doctrine of taqiyya; see here, here, and here for examples; for other sanctioned forms of deception, read about tawriya, and taysir.)

It is, incidentally, because of all these Koran verses — because of Sharia — that the Islamic State forthrightly explained: “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers.”

The closest the authors get to addressing these issues is in a section titled “Can Muslims in the West be Loyal Citizens?” They respond with a “yes.” However, the evidence they cite are polls (based on wishful interpretations), which of course tell the reader little about the topic at hand: Sharia.

Jihad

As might be expected, when the authors reach the topic of jihad, their dissembling reaches a new level. They repeatedly insist that jihad, as enshrined in Sharia, is simply the Muslim counterpart of Western “Just War” theory, which teaches that war and aggression are permissible only in defense or to recover one’s territory from occupiers. They write: “The lesser or outer jihad involves defending Islam and the Muslim community.”

As usual, they spend much time quoting and elaborating on Koran verses that comport with this position, while ignoring or sidelining the many contradictory verses. In reality, mainstream Islam holds that the Koran’s “Sword Verses” (especially 9:5 and 9:29) abrogate all the peaceful ones, and declare that warfare against non-Muslims — for no reason other than that they are not Muslims — to be not just permissible but obligatory.

Koran 9:29 reads:

Fight those who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth [Islam] from the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.

What, exactly, is “defensive” about this verse?

Similarly, they claim that dar al-harb, or “abode of war” — Islam’s designation for all non-Muslim territories (such as Europe) that Muslims were historically in a permanent state of war with — “applied to other parties with whom Muslims were in conflict.” Again, they fail to mention that the primary reason Muslims were “in conflict” with them was because they were non-Muslim, and that all non-Muslim territories were by default part of the “abode of war,” except when treaties advantageous to Islam were drawn.

Instead, the authors write: “The territories classified as the abode of war were those that refused to provide such protection to Muslims and their clients” — thereby implying Muslims were hostile to, say, Europe because Europe was first hostile to Muslims. (The historical reality, chronicled in my book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, was exactly opposite.)

The authors engage in other forms of subterfuge to defend their point and exonerate Sharia. For example, they frequently project a Western definition to Islamic terms and concepts. They write that Sharia is ultimately about “promoting good and preventing evil,” which sounds admirable. They then fail to point out that, based on the Koran and Sunna (that is, Sharia), conquering non-Muslim territories is “promoting good.” And that keeping women under wraps, indoors, and beating them as required is about “preventing vice.”

While admitting that Christians and other non-Muslim minorities are currently being persecuted, not only do the authors insist this has nothing to do with Shariah, but they invoke relativistic thinking: “Just as Muslims living in non-Muslim countries are often concerned with their rights and civil liberties as minorities, so some consider the rights and status of non-Muslim minorities living in Muslim countries to be a parallel issue.”

In other words, because Americans may view Muslims in their midst with suspicion, the ongoing enslavement and slaughter of Christians — more than 6,000 in Nigeria alone since January 2018 — and ban on or destruction of churches is a tit-for-tat. A “parallel issue,” which can only be solved when the West becomes less critical about Islam.

Relativism is also invoked during the authors’ brief treatment of apostasy in Islam: “Historically, apostasy was sometimes punishable by death in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” They claim that apostasy is still a major issue in Islam only due to “radical” interpretations or politics, and they bolster their position by again quoting the same Koran verses that seem to support freedom of religion. They do not mention, for example, the canonical hadith (meaning part of Sharia) in which Muhammad said: “Whoever leaves his religion [Islam], kill him.”

Such is how Islam’s skilled apologists dupe the West: they admit to some of the more controversial aspects that many other apologists shy away from — namely that Shariah is indeed foundational to Islam, and that most Muslims revere and wish to see it implemented — and then, having established trust with the reader, they slip back into the “game.” They portray all the intolerance, misogyny, violence, and terrorism committed daily in the name of Islam as products of anything and everything except Sharia: fallible Muslim interpretations, self-serving clerics and terrorists, socio-economic pressures, Western criticism or encroachments.

Contrary to its title John Esposito’s and Natana J. Delong-Bas’s Shariah is not “what everyone needs to know.” Rather, it’s what non-Muslims need to believe in order to give Sharia, which is fundamentally hostile to all persons and things un-Islamic, a free pass.