is the question Okla-homa’s voters will decide next month.
The nearly four million residents of this largely rural state will vote whether or not to amend Oklahoma’s constitution so that state courts will be prohibited “from considering or using” international or Sharia law in their decisions.
Never mind that no effort has been made to introduce Sharia law in a court decision in Oklahoma, which has only 30,000 Muslim residents.
The state legislators who drafted the “Save Our State” amendment see it as a “pre-emptive” measure meant to block the perceived march of Islamic global domination.
“Will Sharia law make my life better, my wife or my kids’ lives better here in America? I don’t think so,” said Lewis Moore, an Oklahoma state representative and one of the amendment’s proponents.
“We’re at war. One of the things about being at war is to protect our home turf. I don’t trust people in Washington to protect our home state.”
To protect it from what remains unclear. To many, Moore’s proposed amendment appears to be nothing more than the latest iteration of this summer’s anti-Islam fervor—a cynical gambit meant to work voters into a lather before the November elections.
But, unlike the political grandstanding that characterized the Ground Zero mosque debate and the Florida pastor’s Qoran-burning threats, the Oklahoma vote could have real impact. Legal scholars worry that the amendment’s language could have a chilling effect on the 14,000 foreign companies that operate in Oklahoma and their thousands of employees.
“The risks to Oklahoma businesses and individual citizens of Oklahoma, in my opinion, far outweigh the very remote speculative risk that the sponsors of this proposition have advanced,” said Peter Krug, a professor of international law at the University of Oklahoma School of Law.
Prof. Krug said international commerce has always relied on the expectation that American courts would respect reasonable foreign judicial decisions. If Oklahoma courts are suddenly barred from considering foreign jurisprudence, foreign businesses may come to see Oklahoma as a risky business destination.
But the more likely result, legal scholars say, is that a federal court will declare the state constitutional amendment illegal almost as soon as it can be applied—a kind of constitutional stillbirth that will create no more real damage than wasting the court’s time, said Lea Brilmayer, a professor of international law at the Yale University School of Law.
“The problem with this is that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. This is about as clear an example as I’ve seen,” said Prof. Brilmayer, who added that because Oklahoma’s constitution is subordinate to the federal constitution, which already deals with international treaties, even a low-level federal court could handily reverse the amendment.
“It would be a waste of court resources and a waste of time and create a lot of animosity—all for the good of people who would want to make a political point. It would be very unfortunate,” said Prof. Brilmayer.
Yet Oklahoma’s residents seem to have made up their minds. The amendment is just the sort of political red meat that pundits expect to sizzle in the balloting. A July survey conducted by SoonerPoll, an Oklahoma polling company, reported that 49 per cent of respondents were in favor of the amendment, 24 per cent were opposed and 27 per cent were undecided.
“It’s really going to be something if it does pass and it’s absolutely ridiculous and uncalled for,” said Razi Hashmi, the executive director of the Oklahoma branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“The whole state of Oklahoma is venturing to bring big business to the state of Oklahoma, both foreign and national. So it’s something that really could hurt our state.”
The anti-Sharia rhetoric capitalizes on ignorance; Hashmi said Sharia law is misunderstood by many Muslims, to say nothing of non-Muslims.
Because the Islamic canon is not written like a legal textbook, Muslim scholars disagree on the tenets of Sharia and how they should be applied to modern systems of law, said Abdullahi Ahmed al-Naim, a professor at the Emory University School of Law.
“Sharia is not law at all. It’s a religious normative system,” said Prof. Naim. “So it does not become state law unless or until a state’s constitutionally or legally established system of enacting law adopts a Sharia norm to make it part of the law of the country.”
When Sharia principles are incorporated into a statute, they are no longer Sharia. They are simply the law, stripped bare of their erstwhile religious significance.
But even state Representative Moore sounded proudly ignorant of Sharia when asked about it.
“What do I need to know about it? Why would I care?” he said. “This is the greatest country in the world and the greatest legal system in the world. Why would we want to change that?”
Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives during the 1990s, has made opposition to the Ground Zero mosque and Sharia law part of his speeches around the country. Gingrich is contemplating a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
“We should have a federal law that says Sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States,” Gingrich told a conservative audience at the Values Voter Summit in Washington September 18.
Gingrich’s comments were not-so-thinly veiled references to recent Senate confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor prior to their swearing-in as US Supreme Court justices.
They both faced harsh questioning about their respect and use of foreign legal precedents in their decisions. In June, four senators questioned Kagan about her perceived deference to international and foreign laws. Kagan said she was “in favor of good ideas wherever we can get them”.
Gingrich’s warned of a “stealth jihad” and received a standing ovation from one dinner audience, revealing the appeal of such rhetoric.
Just as the Florida Qoran-burning and Ground Zero episodes showed, the global Muslim community may come to see the Oklahoma initiative as something more than just American politicians pandering for short-term gain.
“In my view, it has more to do with the November elections than with 9/11. There is a deliberate fear-mongering or hate-mongering to discredit certain candidates,” said Prof. Naim. “The irony is that even if this initiative is defeated,… it will be presented in the region—in Africa and Asia—as something much wider and mainstream in the United States.”