What Sharia Actually Means and Why the American Scare Campaign Gets It Wrong
By Daisy Khan
Sharia, Islamic law, Muslim women's rights, and the Islamophobia industry collide in a new episode of WISE Women with Daisy Khan, where host Dr. Daisy Khan and legal scholar Sumbul Ali-Karamali expose how a 1,400-year-old ethical framework became one of the most deliberately distorted words in American political life. Ali-Karamali, author of Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It's Not Taking Over Our Country, holds a law degree from UC Davis and an LLM in Islamic law from the University of London. This conversation arrives as Republican lawmakers have reintroduced legislation seeking to ban Sharia enforcement in the United States, a proposal built on manufactured fear rather than legal reality.
The timing matters. With midterm cycles amplifying anti-Muslim rhetoric and the so-called "No Sharia Act" resurfacing in Congress, the gap between what Sharia actually is and what Americans have been conditioned to believe continues to widen.
A Word That Means the Path to Water, Not the Path to Theocracy
The Arabic word Sharia literally translates to "the road to the watering place," a metaphor rooted in desert survival that points toward the path God wants believers to follow. For Muslims, following Sharia in daily life means consulting the Quran, the Sunna (the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad), and fiqh, the vast body of interpretive legal scholarship developed over centuries. Ali-Karamali emphasizes that fiqh is not a rigid rulebook. It is an enormous library of opinions, debates, arguments, and contradictions produced by scholars who understood that legal reasoning required flexibility.
This flexibility is one of the most suppressed facts in American conversations about Islam. Ali-Karamali describes how two respected Egyptian scholars publicly debated whether Muslim women were required to cover their hair, reached opposite conclusions, and both were considered correct under Islamic legal methodology. Consensus among scholars existed on roughly 1% of legal issues throughout history, meaning 99% of questions carried a range of legitimate answers. The five pillars of Islam, including prayer, fasting, charity, belief in God, and the Hajj pilgrimage, represent the areas of broad agreement. Nearly everything else remained open to scholarly interpretation, local custom, and individual conscience.
The Punishments That Were Never Meant to Be Applied
American media fixates on images of stoning and amputation when discussing Sharia. Ali-Karamali dismantles these portrayals by walking through the evidentiary standards that made such punishments virtually extinct in practice. For a charge of illicit sexual conduct, Islamic law required four eyewitnesses to the act of penetration itself, not circumstantial evidence, not two people seen together, but graphic visual confirmation of the act in explicit anatomical detail. Those four witnesses then had to be proven trustworthy, their testimonies had to match in every detail, and a single discrepancy meant the entire case was dismissed.
Even clearing that nearly impossible threshold did not guarantee punishment. The accused could invoke defenses including mistake, duress, coercion, and repentance. A statement of repentance alone was grounds for a judge to dismiss the case. If all defenses failed, the court could still throw out the prosecution on the basis of doubt. Unlike the American standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt," Islamic law demanded absolute certainty, zero percent doubt. Ali-Karamali cites the legal maxim attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: "Ward off the Hudud as much as you can, and if you can let the accused go free, then you must do so." This was the operating principle. In 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, only one person was ever executed for adultery, and that case was political and controversial.
The Colonizers Who Found Sharia Too Lenient
One of the most disruptive revelations in the conversation is how British colonialism reshaped Sharia in ways that directly harmed women. When the British colonized India, they considered the existing Sharia-based legal system too soft on crime. In homicide cases, Islamic law gave the victim's family three options: demand execution, seek monetary compensation, or forgive the offender, with forgiveness always the preferred moral choice. British judges overturned existing rulings, imposed harsher penalties, and introduced "provocation" as a legal defense for men who killed their wives. These are the origins of what the world now calls honor killings, a concept with no basis in Sharia.
British and European colonizers also dismantled the institutional infrastructure that had supported Islamic legal education for centuries. In Egypt, where free education had been available to boys and girls alike, colonial administrations defunded schools and seized the charitable endowments, called waqf, that sustained them. Over half of Egypt's waqf endowments were operated or owned by women. When colonizers codified Sharia into rigid legal codes that British judges could administer, the nuances disappeared. The pluralistic range of legal opinions was flattened. The rights of women, including the many grounds on which women could seek divorce, were among the first casualties. Ali-Karamali calls codification a "death nail" for the Sharia-based legal system. No authentic Sharia legal system exists anywhere in the world today.
The Legal DNA America Does Not Want to Acknowledge
Ali-Karamali presents a historical argument that challenges foundational assumptions about Western legal identity. In the 12th century, England's King Henry II sought to overhaul a legal system still relying on trials by fire and water. His contemporary, Roger II of Sicily, ruled a territory with 200 years of Islamic legal infrastructure still intact. The two Norman kings exchanged court personnel. It was not a coincidence, Ali-Karamali argues, that Henry established a case-based common law system structurally parallel to the Sharia court system. The rest of Europe followed Roman civil law, and England became the outlier. American common law descends directly from this English system. Principles Americans consider foundational, the right to a trial, protection against self-incrimination, prohibitions on illegal searches and seizures, all existed in Islamic jurisprudence centuries earlier.
The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this connection by featuring a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad among history's greatest lawmakers in its courtroom frieze. Noah Feldman, a Harvard professor of Jewish and Islamic law, has stated that for a thousand years, Islamic law offered the most humane and liberal principles available anywhere in the world. These are not fringe claims. They are mainstream legal scholarship that rarely reaches public conversation because, as Ali-Karamali notes, no legal tradition likes to credit another for its foundations.
The Myth That Sharia Subjugates Women, Exposed by the Numbers
The accusation that Sharia inherently oppresses women collapses under examination. Ali-Karamali points to historian Norman Daniel's observation that the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran gave women more rights in the seventh century than English women would receive for another millennium. The Quran's inheritance provisions, often cited as evidence of inequality, granted daughters one-third of a family estate at a time when that figure was revolutionary. In 19th-century England, the setting of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, women inherited nothing at all. Islamic inheritance rules reflected the social reality that sons bore financial responsibility for entire tribes and households, not a statement about women's inherent worth.
Ali-Karamali argues these provisions are open to reinterpretation precisely because the original conditions no longer apply. If her own son and daughter face equal economic realities, leaving them equal shares is entirely consistent with Sharia's interpretive methodology. She also points to metrics that undercut the subjugation narrative entirely: the Muslim world has produced 17 women presidents and prime ministers in the modern era while the United States has yet to elect one, and American Muslim women are the second most educated faith group in the country with the most income parity with men of any faith group. The single greatest factor affecting women's status globally, according to research Ali-Karamali cites, is poverty, not religion.
This is part of the ongoing WISE Women with Daisy Khan series, bringing the voices of Muslim women to the center of conversations about faith, law, justice, and belonging.
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Connect with Dr. Daisy Khan:
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Connect with Sumbul Ali-Karamali:
Website: https://sumbulalikaramali.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumbul-ali-karamali-93559210/
Author Bio:
Sumbul Ali-Karamali grew up in Southern California, where she was often asked questions about Islam and Muslims. From a young age, she became an expert at answering them. That’s why, after earning her B.A. in English, with Distinction, from Stanford University and earning her J.D. from the University of California at Davis, and working in big law for a while, she got another graduate degree (an LLM) in Islamic law from the University of London (SOAS), with Distinction, so that she could write a book answering all the questions she’d been asked all her life. She’s written three books, in fact (two for adults and one for teens), which you can peruse at her website, www.muslimnextdoor.com.
Sumbul is a frequent speaker on Islam and Muslims, for all ages and audiences. She has served on a number of nonprofit boards relating to human rights and justice, and has been both a nonfiction and fiction judge for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (one of her favorite jobs). In her free time, Sumbul enjoys opera, teaching herself the piano, reading (of course), and watching Star Trek reruns with her family. Oh, and she practices corporate law, too.
WISE Women with Daisy Khan
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WISE Women with Daisy Khan gives voice to Muslims sharing their experiences with anti-Muslim bias, educates non-Muslims to become upstanders against discrimination, and spotlights extraordinary women throughout history whose contributions have been erased. We reclaim faith as a force for good while building bridges between East and West, transforming fear into understanding, one conversation at a time.
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News [Source: CBS Evening News]
A man sent a hateful message to a Muslim candidate. He responded with a call for help in an article by Steve Hartman
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-man-sent-a-hateful-message-to-a-muslim-candidate-he-responded-with-a-call-to-help/
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