“Sharia-compliant Islam is ascendant.” So writes the incomparable Andrew C. McCarthy in his foreword to Andrew
Bostom’s timely new book, Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism. And “Western elites have abandoned
the field – or better, put it up for sale to Islamic activists and their
apologists.” This leaves Bostom as “one of the precious few who dare” to put
their considerable scholarly energies into exposing sharia for what it truly
is.
Dr. Andrew Bostom, Associate Professor of Medicine at Rhode
Island Hospital, has published articles and commentary on Islam here on FrontPage
and in the Washington Times, National Review, American
Thinker, and elsewhere in print and online. Bostom is the author of two essential, extraordinary,
and meticulously documented works of scholarship, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy
War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred
Texts to Solemn History (about which I interviewed him here and here for FrontPage). Now he has built upon and transcended those books
with his newest and most important work thus far.
Sharia Versus Freedom is a sobering collection of Bostom’s recent
essays elucidating what is
arguably the most threatening ideology of our time. His distinctive erudition is on full
display in this impossibly
encyclopedic work. Allow me
to break the book down to present an idea of the depth and breadth of its
wide-ranging contents:
The next section is called “Sharia-Compliant Jihad and
Jew-Hatred,” which is fairly self-explanatory but also broader than one might
expect. It includes compelling chapters with such titles as “Jihad in Europe,” “Hindus,
Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai,” “Lara Logan’s Rape and Egyptian Muslim
Jew-Hatred,” “Hitler, Jihad, and Nazism,” and “Understanding the Jihad Against
Israel and America.” In this section Bostom also takes to task such public
figures as Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, law professor Alan Dershowitz, and even
columnist Charles Krauthammer for their ignorance about Islam. He assaults the
myth of Cordoban ecumenism in a chapter about the attempt to raise a mosque
near the World Trade Center. He takes on our Afghanistan strategy in “The
Postmodern COINage of a Failed Policy,” and even female genital mutilation in
Indonesia.
Part 3, “Islam, Sharia, and the Treason of the
Intellectuals,” concerns the West’s “moral and intellectual decay, and
capitulation to the Ur Fascism of the Islamic Jihad.” Again, there is a broad
range of fascinating chapter topics: “Cartoonish Dhimmitude in America,” “Qaradawi,
the ‘Arab Spring,’ and the Treason of the Intellectuals,” “Sharia at Harvard?”
and “Diversity Perversity,” among many others.
In the fourth and final part, “How Do You Solve a Problem
Like Sharia?” Bostom writes on such topics as “An Encyclopedic Antidote to
Islamic Indoctrination in Public Schools” and “Mosques as Barracks in America.”
There are brief chapters on “empowered apostates” Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa
Sultan, on the issue of Osama bin Laden’s sea-burial ceremony, on the First
Amendment and sharia in Dearborn. In the fascinating closing chapter,
“Whittaker Chambers, Communism, and Islam,” Bostom explores how “Chambers’s
witness-martyrdom in the struggle against Communism” can be “applied to the
threat of resurgent Islamic totalitarianism,” and the insights we in the West
can glean from his apostasy.
Along the way, the book presents us with studies of sharia
by leading scholars of Islam; the acknowledgement by academic apologists of contemporary
sharia’s global surge; an abundance of recent polling data from Muslim nations
and immigrant communities in the West confirming the swelling tide of Islamic
law; the assertions of contemporary Muslim intellectuals about the
incompatibility of sharia and Western concepts of universal human rights; and
the overt dissemination of sharia-based legal systems by authoritative,
mainstream Islamic religious and political organizations.
Additional material includes the aforementioned Andrew
McCarthy foreword; an interview with Bostom; his own 48-page introduction, in
which he addresses “the deleterious legacy of Islamic confusion [that scholar]
Bernard Lewis has bequeathed to Western policymaking elites”; and even a
12-page essay on the book’s cover art. The tome closes with a wealth of detailed
notes (more than 160 pages worth). Bostom can’t ever be accused of
shortchanging his readers.
Open the book to virtually any page, begin reading, and even
if you’ve been studying Islamic totalitarianism and keeping abreast of it for
years, as most FrontPage readers have, you will learn something new.
Bostom concludes one section of the book by quoting
Whittaker Chambers’ famed autobiography about the Red Menace, and highlighting
its relevance to the challenge facing us today from Islam: “It is part of the
failure of the West,” Chambers begins,
to understand that it is at grips
with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two
irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable
moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future
are involved, and hence their conflict is irrepressible.
After which Bostom asks, “Does twenty-first century America
possess Chambers’s moral compass and fortitude to combat the modern scourge of
ancient Islamic totalitarianism?”
Good question. The answer, of course, remains to be seen. Meanwhile,
arming ourselves with the clear-eyed, irrefutable scholarship of Andrew Bostom’s
Sharia Versus Freedom is a necessary
step toward fully comprehending the worldwide rise of that modern scourge, and
successfully vanquishing it.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 11/16/12)
