Superior Court Judge John Selser found the marriage contract valid under New Jersey law, concluding, “Clearly, this court can enforce a contract which is not in contravention of established law or public policy.”

When the wife filed for divorce, she asked the court to enforce the mahr, or dowry provision, in her contract, which called for the husband’s payment of $10,000 upon the dissolution of their marriage. Odatalla, a New Jersey couple had signed an Islamic marriage contract consistent with their cultural traditions. Islamic law has been considered by American courts in everything from the recognition of foreign divorces and custody decrees to the validity of marriages, the enforcement of money judgments, and the awarding of damages in commercial disputes and negligence matters.Īs an attorney, consultant or expert witness, I have handled more than 100 cases involving components of Sharia.

Marriages, divorces, corporations and commercial transactions are global, meaning that US courts must regularly interpret and apply foreign law. The true story of Sharia in American courts is not one of a plot for imminent takeover but rather another part of the tale of globalization. The percentage was even higher-52 percent-among those who said they most trust Fox News.Īpart from stoking Islamophobia, such anti-Sharia bills stand to have a negative effect on the legal system in states that embrace them, altering the routine decisions made in US courts every day. A 2011 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that 30 percent of Americans believe Muslims want to establish Sharia in the United States. However absurd, the notion that radical Muslims are trying to take over the country seems to be catching on. Michele Bachmann declared that Sharia “must be resisted across the United States,” and Herman Cain condemned the “attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government.” “I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Newt Gingrich said in July 2010. Like Reagan’s dire rhetoric on communism, warnings of a looming Islamic takeover have come from Republicans running for president. Yet support for such bans has come from the highest political spheres. To suggest that banning Sharia or the Bible is the only way to ward off the stoning of women or the execution of apostates is clearly, maliciously false. Sharia is as much a threat to our Constitution as Bible verses calling for the stoning of adulterers or the genocidal directive in Deuteronomy to leave “alive nothing that breathes.” Like the Old and New Testaments, Sharia has its own conflicts and tensions with modern conceptions of gender equality and citizenship.

Although the emergence of the nation-state did away with the premodern methodology of Sharia, its current manifestations are either a source of legislation or actual state law in many Muslim countries.įrom a legal perspective, the wave of anti-Sharia legislation should be much ado about nothing. For devout Muslims, Sharia governs everything from the way they eat to how they treat animals and protect the environment, to how they do business, how they marry and how their estate is distributed after death. More than simply “law” in the prescriptive sense, it is also the methodology through which Muslims engage with foundational religious texts to search for the divine will. Sharia, or Islamic law, is a complex system of moral codes that governs all aspects of Muslim life. (The Oklahoma statute was struck down this past January, with a federal court ruling that lawmakers failed to “identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve.”) Richard Thompson, a former Michigan prosecutor and president of the right-wing Thomas More Law Center-whose website cites “Confronting the Threat of Islam” as a key part of its advocacy-recently admitted that “Sharia law is the thing people think about” when it comes to such bans. Since 2010, when Oklahoma voters first passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting judges from considering international law in their decisions, two dozen states have proposed or passed similar legislation.

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