VOTING FOR GOD: THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SHARIA LAW WITHIN A

DEMOCRACY

“Sharia Law” is a term that evokes strong feeling within people regardless of their

political persuasion, whether it be for a desire to fulfill a religious obligation or to prevent the

establishment of a foreign theocracy perceived as opposed to Western values. While there are

many countries that have implemented various forms of Islamic “Sharia Law” through autocratic

action, more interesting are the cases in which a form of Sharia is adopted into law through

democratic means. The areas that have adopted Islamic law through democratic procedure are

less numerous than those that have implemented it using strong state power, but the study of

these regions become increasingly important as migrants escaping violence within Muslim

nations seek asylum within democratic countries. Political commentators and concerned citizens

alike from these and other Western nations have voiced concerns for the desire some of these

migrants express for the enforcement of an Islamic legal code. Among the Muslims that hail

from regions now dispersing throughout the world (mostly Northern African and the Middle

East), a large Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of these individuals desire

implementation of some form of “Sharia Law” as the official law of the state, though specifics of

what would constitute a proper Sharia were not mentioned in the questioning (Lipka).

So what really is “Sharia Law” as popular Western dialect would phrase it? There’s

really no good answer to this question as the Quran itself does not contain a formal legal code as

we understand legislation to be written. While there are certainly rules for Muslim life recorded

within the Quran (some more straightforwardly than others), the formation of “Sharia Law” is

handled by various different schools of Islamic thought, comparable to the various Protestant

sects that exist within the United States. The term “Sharia Law” itself is actually something of a
misnomer given that, at least among the non puritanical schools of Islam, the Sharia is something

entirely removed from the law. Outside of very literalist and aggressive schools such as the

Wahhabi sect Sharia is understood to be one’s personal commitment to their faith (Ahmed). To

make an analogy, the “Sharia” of a Catholic may compel them to avoid eating meat on Fridays

while to a Methodist this would be totally acceptable, despite both individuals self identifying as

followers of Christianity. Each individual school of Islam interprets the Quran and various

Hadith (the relayed sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, mostly quoted by his friends and family

who lived past his death) and determines from that what they feel constitutes a proper Muslim

“Sharia”, and determine the degree to which abiding by such lifestyle should be considered

mandatory to be a practicing member of the school (and consequently a faithful Muslim)

(Ahmed).

Many liberal Muslims living within the Western world consider the Sharia something too

interpretive to create a legal code out of, given that many components of “Sharia Law” as

they’ve come to be understood in places such as Saudi Arabia are based upon human

interpretations of the Quran which are based on less than straightforward passages which can be

taken to mean different things depending on how the excerpts are contextualized (Ahmed). They

also point out that many of the “Sharia laws” are based on different Hadith, which given their

secondhand nature make them far from holy commandments from Allah (Ahmed). Different

schools also have different opinions as to which Hadith are valid and which were either not

spoken by Muhammad or had become misconstrued over the centuries the Hadith was passed on

orally.

A large number of these Muslims are critical of the concept of Sharia Law itself, as

during the time of the Islamic Caliphate there was no such thing. In reality the first rulers of
these Caliphates governed in a way that could be called an early version of Federalism in which

the Caliph would implement mostly secular laws to organize the state and the Caliphate as a

whole while collecting tribute from localities and granting them a large degree of autonomy in

terms of enforcing criminal codes, which were not often codified as modern Western laws are.

Given that the Caliphate grew over time to include non-Muslim groups in its borders this was for

a practical purpose mostly, but also showed that there never was a formally agreed upon set of

Islamic laws for all Muslims to follow, interpretation and individual piety were respected in what

could be considered the most legitimate Islamic Empire to ever exist, given Muhammad

established it.

Even following this period of the original Caliphate the concept of a “Sharia Law” was

used more to control Muslim populations than to empower them to live out their beliefs. Prior to

colonization by Western nations Arab states did not legally compel their people to follow any

particular form of Sharia, leaving it as a personal consideration of one’s faith (Ahmed).

Enforcement of religious tenets were left to smaller courts detached from the government, as

families or individuals would take their concerns to a judge who was known to be an expert in

their particular school of Islam for arbitration (Ahmed).

This changed as Colonial powers sought to “civilize” the traditional Arab societies of the

lands they conquered in Africa and the Middle East and discarded the traditional means of

conflict resolution from the region entirely. In the place of these traditional systems European

powers implemented European style laws written out into codes like the laws used today. This is

where “Sharia Law” as it is understood today was birthed, as to appease local religious

powerholders as not to stir up a religiously inspired insurrection Colonial Authorities

implemented Family Laws into the legal systems of these new colonies that tried to keep intact
what was considered to be the the closest thing to a universal Islamic law (Ahmed). While

religious figures were glad to retain at least some degree of theocratic rule within their nations,

this codification of Islamic law deprived Muslims in these lands the ability to understand and

apply Islam through their own school of thought. It also removed much of the element of

discretion from enforcement of Islamic rules that even secular legal systems value for crafting

fitting punishments for convicted individuals, and on the religious end of things made it

impossible for Muslims to express the virtues of mercy many schools of Islamic thought felt

were central to Muhammad’s message.

The belief that a true “Sharia Law” is impossible to form is of course not held by all

Muslims as it is a more liberal perspective within the Islamic community, after all, if this were

the case there wouldn’t be any democratically established Islamic legal codes in the world. To

explain the history of the concept of Sharia Law seemed useful though, primarily for illustrating

its amorphous nature that will become relevant as this paper discusses the disparity in how the

supposed Sharia is adopted and applied across various regions. It also serves as a demonstration

of why fears of migrants from Islamic nations fighting to topple secular government and prop up

a “Sharia State” are overblown, as once Muslims move to these nations many of them succumb

to their new culture and liberalize their beliefs to be more compatible with their new secular

surroundings.

When people think about nations that are both democratic and mostly Islamic people

usually jump to Indonesia first in their minds, which is also the world’s most populous Muslim

majority country. Though to say it’s a democratic Muslim nation is not to say that it is

completely governed by Sharia law, as in fact only a small region within the country enforces an

Islamic legal code. That is not to assert that there have not been political movements that have
attempted to bring about a national theocratic legal code though, as a survey done in 2003 of

Indonesian people found that seventy one percent of the population had a desire to implement

some form of Sharia nationally (Hays), though further questions revealed most had a moderate

idea of what that would look like, with a majority viewing headscarf laws unfavorably (Hays).

The region of Aceh within Indonesia is a semi-autonomous region that is unique in that it

is the only part of the country that has been granted special status by the national government to

fully implement “Sharia” into the province’s laws and courts, and makes for an excellent case

study of the application of “Sharia” within a democracy. This of course was a gradual process,

as after the 2001 national law granting this status passed it took two years for provincially

enforceable Sharia inspired criminal codes to be passed by the Aceh legislature (Hays). These

included laws against alcohol consumption, gambling, as well as unmarried men and women

being within too close a proximity to one another. These laws were applied to Muslims and non-

Muslim minorities alike and created logistical issues within Aceh’s legal system due to the

necessity to split finite legal resources between both the secular court system as well as the

consequential need to build more Sharia courts (Non-Muslims had a choice to be tried in a

secular court but only if their transgression of the law is triable in either court) (Hays). Also

serving as a source of growing pains moving into a Sharia-ruled society was the implementation

of a specialized police force tasked with enforcing these religious laws, making both secular and

theocratic laws more difficult to enforce given the split of one police force into two.

This would only be the beginning of a transition to more harsh Islamic laws being

adopted and implemented, and where the more undesirable effects of mixing theocracy and

democracy start to come to light. Similarly to how within the politics of the United States

candidates will attempt to raise their profile by trying to be more conservative, more liberal,
tougher on crime, and so on and so forth, politicians in Aceh raced to appear more pious than

their rivals to appeal to the massive bloc of the faithful within the province. Adoption of Islamic

laws snowballed quickly after these initial laws were adopted to popular reception among the

people of Aceh, and the Sharia of the region began to resemble that of Saudi Arabia more and

more, as even laws requiring headscarves for women were adopted over time (Hays).

The most interesting of these developments is the adoption of violent public punishment

for violating Sharia laws. In 2005 Aceh held its first public canings marking a dark new chapter

in the province’s adoption of Islamic laws, as convicted gamblers were “caned” publicly in a

grand spectacle akin to a Middle Ages execution in terms of fanfare among the event’s

spectators, who cheered as the gamblers were punished in what many viewed as a remedial event

(Hays). This would be the first of many canings carried out within the province, as the

punishment lost its sense of spectacle and became a routine part of law enforcement, with many

“Vice and Virtue Squads” making use of it as they would do things such as patrol beaches

looking for unmarried couples getting too intimate and insufficiently covered women (Hays). As

time passed and the Muslim majority within the region came to believe more fully in their

Islamic legal system the provincial legislature even went as far as to apply Sharia law completely

to all people within Aceh in 2014, so that even foreigners visiting on business would have to

fully comply with their religiously motivated laws (Hays). Through the power of representative

democracy the formerly officially secular province of Aceh had morphed into a harsh theocracy

that used violence to enforce its policies in less than two decades. While there are of course even

Muslim people who opposed this strong implementation of religious law, many of them were

afraid to speak out against their adoption due to the cultural consequences of appearing to be an

unfaithful Muslim, and also for fears of being prosecuted for blasphemy (Hays).
 Given this case study of what happens when a religious community gains the power to

make laws without any secular grounding, it is hard to recommend this approach for any secular

state attempting to placate a growing Muslim population. Despite rhetoric of Sharia law

overtaking secular national law being overblown there is reason to exercise caution when

granting a community the power to create theocracy. That said it is possible it could come off as

pandering and insulting to implement only very select elements of Islamic law into the legal

system and can create a fiercer appetite for a more holistic religious law, as occurred when

European powers tried to meet the fiercely Islamic halfway by implementing Islamic Family

Law (Ahmed). A more lasting approach would be to promote groups within the Islamic

community that support the more historical version of the concept of Sharia in which it is a

personal religious commitment which works best when any arbitration that may arise over

transgressions of religious tenets are resolved by respected religious arbitrators rather than the

state. While doing this is far easier said than done, it may be the only solution that fully

preserves the secular rule of law within a nation while at least somewhat accommodating the

desire of the pious to live life as they believe their God commands them to.

WORKS CITED

Hays, J. (2015). ISLAMIC LAW IN INDONESIA | Facts and Details. [online]

Factsanddetails.com. Available at:

http://factsanddetails.com/indonesia/Government_Military_Crime/sub6_5b/entry-

4069.html [Accessed 2 May 2018].

Ahmed An-Nai’m, A. (2018). Sharia Law. [online] Muslims for Progressive Values. Available

at: http://www.mpvusa.org/sharia-law/# [Accessed 2 May 2018].

Lipka, M. (2018). Muslims and Islam: Key findings in the U.S. and around the world. [online]

Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2017/08/09/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-

world/ [Accessed 2 May 2018].