hi clo,
"we don't do religious tests."
i don't think he was proposing a religious test. sharia is islamic, but it is a sort of law, albeit a law derived from religious texts. in the west we put law into a secular category of questioning. discussing adherence to sharia is not offensive to a person's religious beliefs. it is about the character of the law and whether it is intrinsically man-made or derived from divine revelation.
islamists (the sort of folks who are a bit like Christian fundamentalists but with a different idea of the extent of religion) propose the imposition of religious law and politics on the countries they inhabit. trump mentioned people who want to bring sharia to the us. such people, by definition, don't support the notion of a secular state. a state which derives its principles from the temporal world and that does not raise one religion above others.
the us doesn't do religious constitutions.
it is a secular country. why not seek to screen out people who oppose the us constitution because it is secular? why not choose instead those who don't want to impose religious law on everyone else (a secular statement)? who accept the western model that your religion is your own choice (a secular statement)? who allow that you can change religions without penalty (another secular statement)? who don't believe that killing their daughter if she chooses to marry a jew is a matter of honour (a secular statement)? in this way, every person who accepts the secular construct of the us, whatever their religion - whether they are moslems or christians or atheists - would be safe from any screening process.
indeed, the underlying test reflects upon the secular constitutional statement which begins the bill of rights: "The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion..."
this absolutely contrasts with the general application of sharia by islamists, which establishes islam and imposes its tenets on all and sundry through the agency of islamic notions of justice, which spring from the koran and the hadiths.
i stand behind my doubts that trump's sharia test is doable. but defining a person's support of sharia isn't a religious test. it's a constitutional test.
the reason why you might target islamists is not that their ideas are so powerful that they will succeed in the public debate. it is that islamists are the population from which jihadist terrorists spring.
if you don't segregate terrorists from the general moslem population, you do harm to peaceful moslems. the aim is to winnow the moslem population between those who are inoffensive to secular society and those who are not. turning a blind eye to the problem of radical islam is wishful thinking. i want western countries to help moslems who are content to live alongside people of other belief systems to draw a bright line between themselves and the jihadists. islamism is a sub-group through which that line flows. they must decide on which side of it they stand. from a constitutional point-of-view.
that would be reasonable demand coming from the established domestic population: you come here, we want to know you are joining our society, not planning to reject entirely its core values to suit yourself.
| 