I know I’ve been talking (and possibly stalling) a lot about the Sharia law but that’s only because I think it’s a very important issue, and it could lead to a mutual understanding and acceptance if it addressed properly. In the last two posts (1 & 2) I’ve discussed briefly the history of Sharia law and the reasons why a lot of Muslims want to apply it in the Muslim world. In this post I am going to talk about the misconceptions about Sharia.

The demand of Sharia law had brought a huge controversy throughout the world and that controversy led the spread of false information and misconceptions and I will try to clear four of the most important of them in the following points:

1- Muslims wants to apply Sharia in non-Muslim countries: Because of the negative media coverage (and a few Muslim extremists) people outside the Muslim world think that Muslims wants to apply Sharia law in their countries which is not true, Muslims only want to apply Sharia in their own countries and it will be a hypocrisy to demand it to be applied in a non-Muslim state while Muslims don’t have it in their own countries.

2- Sharia is against women: again because of the same reason; the media, people think Sharia is against women, and that because Islam demands women to wear Hijab, (in my opinion people who think a little piece of cloth in the head determines your freedom don’t know anything about it), for example Quran stated

“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Acquainted”

and that clearly stated that there is no difference between men and women in Islam.

3- Sharia have a cruel punishments: some punishments like in the case of stealing (cutting the hand of the thief) may look cruel but it helps in reducing the crime rates and these punishments only applied if a very strict requirements are satisfied, so these punishments are rarely applied.

4- Sharia will suppress other religious minorities: that’s obviously not true and a quick look at history will show you that Muslims throughout history lived peacefully with Christians and Jews during the Islamic rule, and that’s why Christians still exists in the Arab world, if Muslims were killing them in the last 14 centuries as some people think they should all be dead now.

These are the main misconceptions people have about Islam and again with open-mindedness and constructive debate all the problems can be solved, anything else will generate hate and hate will generate violence and the cycle will repeat itself.