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Are Iraqis getting their own Islamic ayatollah? Sounds implausible, but they might, if Shi'ites get their way in the new Iraqi Governing Council. In a recent meeting wrapped in secrecy, Shi'ite clerics pushed through a resolution to establish sharia—Islamic law applied to daily life—as the supreme law of the land. Iraqi women, in particular, are vehemently protesting the move. "This new law will send Iraqi families back to the Middle Ages," said retired female judge Zakia Ismael Hakki. "It will allow men to have four or five or six wives. It will take away children from their mothers. It will allow anyone who calls himself a cleric to open an Islamic court in his house and decide about who can marry and divorce and have rights. We have to stop it."

These days, any mention of sharia raises hackles among Christians. Consider, for example, Nigerian Catholic archbishop Anthony Olubunmi Okogie's dismay (not to mention many others) over the conviction of a Nigerian woman of adultery and her sentencing by Islamic clerics to death by stoning. In Sudan, authorities in Khartoum have used sharia to wage war against Christians. And now anxiety over sharia is spreading to the West. Christians in Britain especially fear a takeover by sharia should Islam ever become the religion of the majority of the population.

But what exactly is sharia and what does it mean for the rule of the land? According to Maurits Berger of the University of Amsterdam, sharia embodies Islamic divine law set down in the Qur'an and the sayings of Muhammad. It may also derive from the laws articulated in the Pact of Umar (see our newsletter, "Legacy of an Ancient Pact," for more on this pact's history, and Christian Historyissue 74: Christians & Muslims, for the full text of the pact).

But it's also, according to Berger, "a code of conduct for all events, walks and way of life. It deals with proper behavior in the bathroom as well as the battlefield, on the market as well as in the mosque." As far as the law is concerned, says reporter Susie Steiner, sharia consistently carried out punishes "unlawful sexual intercourse (outside marriage), false accusation of unlawful intercourse, the drinking of alcohol, theft, and highway robbery. Sexual offences carry a penalty of stoning to death or flogging while theft is punished with cutting off a hand."

To be sure, American Christians can identify with Muslims' desire to curb sexual immorality, drunkenness, and theft. After all, haven't we fought alcoholism with Prohibition and, more recently, tried to block the legalization of homosexual unions? But to punish these offenses with such extreme measures? Surely not in the U.S.A.

The Puritan "Theocracy"
But then we would be forgetting seventeenth-century Puritan New England. Most Americans know about the Puritan dream to build a "city on a hill" that other Christian nations might admire and desire to emulate. We tend to view this through the lens of the American experiment in democracy, where in implementing the rights of men, the young nation would inspire the world to follow her example and create a model society.

But the Puritans owed their loyalty not to country primarily—rather, they intended to establish a "visible" kingdom of God on earth. While they believed God chose only the elect, they also believed biblical commands compelled those who lived in covenant with God to enforce good behavior and morals on everyone. In 1641, the Puritan John Cotton wrote, "When we undertake to be obedient to God," we do so not only "in our owne names, and for our owne parts, but in the behalf of every soul that belongs to us … our wives, and children, and servants, and kindred, and acquaintance, and all that are under our reach, either by way of subordination, or coordination."

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48