To A Secular Muslim, Ben Carson Had a Point

25 Sep, 2015 by McGuire

Love or hate Ben Carson, you have to appreciate the man for his direct comments about Muslims running the country. The excerpt from a secular Muslim’s column sheds light on this in a very different and interesting way:

Ben Carson’s blunt remarks about a Muslim president triggered much outrage, even after he partially walked them back. But secular Muslims like me, who reject political Islam, understood what he meant: He doesn’t want a Muslim as president who doesn’t believe in the strict secular separation of mosque and state, so that the laws of the state aren’t at all touched by sharia, or Islamic law derived from the Quran and hadith, the sayings and traditions of prophet Muhammad. Neither do we. We really don’t want a first lady—or a president—in a burka, or face veil.

Carson’s comments underscore a political reality in which Muslim communities, not only in far-flung theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also in the United States, still struggle with existential questions about whether Islam is compatible with democracy and secularism. This struggle results in the very real phenomenon of “creeping sharia,” as critics in the West call it (and which some Muslims like to mock as an “Islamophobic” allegation). While the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment states the United States “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” the Quran states that Allah “takes account of every single thing (72:28),” which has led to the divine mandate by leading Muslim scholars to reject secularism, or alamaniya, or the way of the “world,” derived, from the Arabic root for world, alam.

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In too many instances, we are seeing an erosion of those boundaries, in part led by some Muslims, increasingly using America’s spirit of religious accommodation and cultural pluralism to challenge rules that most of the rest of America accepts. Many of those incursions have been led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a controversial self-described advocacy group for Muslims that, not surprisingly, called for Carson to step down this week.

Last week, however, New Jersey Muslims stormed out of a Jersey City school board meeting after the school board refused to cancel school at the last minute for the Muslim holiday called “Eid al-Adha,” or “the Feast of Sacrifice,” being celebrated Thursday. CAIR has lobbied public school officials for the change for the sake of “diversity and inclusion.”

At the meeting, the local NBC news segment showed an older woman yelling in Arabic that the holiday was her “right,” followed by a young Muslim woman, wearing a headscarf and smiling eerily as she said, “We’re no longer the minority. That’s clear from tonight. We’re going to be the majority soon.”

More on the ridiculous holiday business is here, but the fact remains that this is a an entitled, ridiculous group of people that needs to either go back to a country with Sharia law, or learn how to live peacefully in the United States, which of course they won’t. Dr. Carson is totally right. He’s just saying what most folks in America fear. Stop with the PC nonsense on this group of savages that clearly have no vested interest in America.

Written by Katie McGuire. Send your hate mail to the author at [email protected], or feel free to mean tweet me at @GOPKatie, where I will be sure to do very little about it.