I saw an episode of Law & Order: SVU while running on the treadmill at the YMCA yesterday morning. (Did you know that show was still going?! I didn’t. I remember watching that show back in the ’90s. I was still in university.) The episode was called “Assumptions”, and Wikipedia tells me it’s the most recent episode, debuting last Wednesday.

The episode involves a Muslim congresswoman with anti-Zionist views who is raped after a confrontation with a couple Jewish youths (whom she claims tried to rip off her hijab) earlier in the day. She claims the Jewish youths raped her in an Islamophobic attack, though she didn’t get a good look at the face of the attacker. One of the detectives (a man) suspects the supposed rape is all just a hoax to boost her public profile.

In typical SVU ripped-from-the-headlines fashion, the politician kinda resembles a cross between Ilhan Omar (she says “it’s all about the Benjamins” at one point) and Linda Sarsour, and her confrontation with the youths resembles the recent incident with the teens from Covington Catholic High School. There are shades of #MeToo and “Believe Women”, and the Jussie Smollett hoax. SVU is very good at what it does.

“Uh oh”, I thought. “Whether it turns out the Jewish youths did it, or if it turns out it’s a hoax, this is going to be problematic either way.” I stuck around to watch the ending, putting in a full 30 minutes on the treadmill (so thank you, SVU).

A couple big twists later (again, SVU is very good at what it does), the case goes in a different direction. It turns out [SPOILERS!] the congresswoman is a closeted lesbian, and she was raped by her homophobic ex-husband, who had been stalking her. Video footage shows the confrontation with the Jewish youths was largely a misunderstanding, and they didn’t try to rip off her hijab.

But did the episode avoid being horribly problematic? No. No, it didn’t.

First of all, I’d like the praise the show for trying to balance the negative stereotype of the violent, homophobic, possessive, Middle Eastern husband (or ex-husband, in this instance) with a more positive portrayal of Middle Easterners in the form of the congresswoman’s immigrant parents who (after a period of being stony-faced) declare that they are still proud of their daughter after finding out she’s a lesbian. (I was kinda expecting them to honour-murder her, because these shows are terrible.)

The problem is that this episode horribly misrepresents Sharia Law, which is repeatedly (and gratuitously) maligned by the show’s characters, with no sympathetic characters speaking up for it.

So, allow me to present:

False statements about Sharia Law in this episode

1. Sharia Law requires adulterous women to be confined to their houses until they die.

At one point, the prosecutor (some new guy who is not Alex Cabot) reads in court a verse from Chapter 4 of the Qur’an which says that adulterous women should be confined to their houses until death takes them, claiming that’s what Sharia Law requires.

No Muslim scholar, not even the extremists, believe this to be part of Sharia Law.

What Chapter 4 actually says is “until death takes them or Allah ordains for them [another] way” (Sahih International translation; my emphasis added). Allah ordains another way for them in Chapter 24, one of the last chapters of the Qur’an to be revealed (the chapters are not in chronological order), where the new punishment for both male and female adulterers is revealed to be a maximum of 100 lashes.

What you have to understand is that before Islam, a common Middle Eastern punishment for adultery was death by stoning. Islam gradually changed that, first reducing the punishment to lifetime house arrest, and then reducing the punishment to a limit of 100 lashes.

Unfortunately, the tradition of stoning adulteresses never completely left the Middle East, and many Muslims mistakenly believe stoning is part of Sharia Law based on weak oral traditions, despite the Qur’anic evidence. (And if you’re one of those Muslims, don’t bother arguing with me. Go argue with Yusuf al-Qaradawi.) And if SVU wants to tackle the issue of stoning one day, fine. But they wouldn’t be able to have a smug scene where the prosecutor reads from the Qur’an about stoning, because it’s not in there.

2. Sharia Law doesn’t allow divorce.

The episode has a weird moment where not-Alex accuses the villainous ex-husband of still believing himself to be married to his ex-wife because “Sharia Law doesn’t recognize divorce, the American way” (quoted from memory; might be slightly wrong), and I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Islam has always recognized divorce. It is not controversial. There did not need to be a Reformation about it. Muslims are not Catholic.

Furthermore, a woman can get a divorce in Islam by going to a judge, which is the same way Americans do it. Some Islamic jurisdictions recognize other methods (like the controversial Triple Talaq), but that’s surely irrelevant.

Nevertheless, the villain confirms the prosecutor’s suspicions via a slip of the tongue (referring to his “wife”, rather than “ex-wife”), because this show is terrible.

3. Sharia Law throws gay people off buildings.

At one point, Detective Ice-T states that the Congresswoman would be thrown off a rooftop for being gay if she lived in Iraq, and no character disagrees with him. I don’t recall if they actually said this was part of Sharia Law, but given the other mentions of Sharia Law in the episode, a viewer could easily assume that.

Let me be clear: No Islamic jurisdiction in the world does that.

ISIS did throw gay men off a building, which is presumably what Detective Ice-T was talking about. But ISIS is a terrorist organization which deliberately does fucked-up shit to shock people, including stuff which is clearly forbidden by Sharia Law (such as setting people on fire). They cannot be considered an example of Sharia Law.

Because the Bible contains verses ordering the execution of homosexual men, I think Westerners tend to assume the Qur’an contains the same thing, but it doesn’t. There is no Leviticus in the Qur’an.

Most Islamic scholars would tell you that homosexuality is a crime called liwat, but it’s not even exactly clear from the Qur’an what liwat is. At one point in Persian history, the term meant drunkenness. Even when taken as homosexuality, there has been great variation throughout the Muslim world about what the punishment for liwat was. In the Hanafi school, the largest of the traditional Muslim schools of jurisprudence, the punishment was a fine.

The Ottoman Empire decriminalized homosexuality in 1858, more than a century before England.

None of the comments about Sharia Law in this episode felt organic to the story. They felt forced and could have been completely omitted without altering the story. It’s clear to me that the writers or producers were trying to “educate” the audience about Sharia Law, which is a problem because everything they said about it was false.

I’m not saying that Sharia Law should be immune from criticism, but this is not genuine criticism. It’s just misinformation.

It’s ironic that the dialogue in this episode decried Islamophobic attacks against Muslims, while also spreading Islamophobia against Sharia Law. To the kind of Hollywood liberals who run shows like SVU, Muslims are okay, but not their religion. Muslims immigrants are welcomed only because of the expectation that they will eventually “assimilate”, which means abandoning their religion. (But it’s a trap. If you’re not white and not black, you’ll be treated as a perpetual foreigner in America no matter what you do.)

Don’t worry, I still love you, Mariska Hargitay.