President Trump’s recent executive order banning refugees from six countries has been mischaracterized as a “Muslim ban,” despite the fact that it leaves out more than 80 percent of the world’s Muslims. In its attempts to smear the president, the liberal media has taken to using what it consider a more “politically correct” term — “Muslim-majority” countries — noting that the populations of these countries are not, in fact, 100 percent Muslim.
However, what the media fails to take into account is that for all practical purposes, these countries are entirely Muslim states because the religion of Islam is woven not just into the religious beliefs of many of their citizens but into the laws of the nations themselves.
Trump’s newly revised order names the countries of Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan (the original order didn’t list the countries but instead referenced Obama-era regulations that spelled them out).
Out of the six above-named countries, Libya is the most complex because it has no functioning central government in the wake of former President Obama’s ordered military intervention and subsequent overthrow of former leader Muammar Gaddafi.
As the CIA World Factbook succinctly states, “Libya’s post-revolution legal status is in flux and driven by state and non-state entities.” The capital of Tripoli was seized by Islamic forces, and the powerful Muslim Brotherhood organization is highly influential.
Another player is Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamic militia that declared Libya a “caliphate” in 2014. Although officially, Gaddafi was a secular leader, he named one of his sons Saif al-Islam, and the 2011 interim Libyan Constitution begins with the words, “Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate…” and states that “Sharia shall be the main source of legislation.”
In Syria, although the government of Bashar al-Assad is nominally secular, there are still many calls from citizens to replace the Syrian state with an Islamic state (although likely not THE Islamic state that is ISIS).
It’s worth noting that even the secular constitution of the Syrian government (both the older one and the revised one adopted in 2012) requires that the country’s president be Muslim and mandates that “Islamic jurisprudence shall be a major source of legislation.”
The former government of Yemen used a mixture of Sharia and civil law for its law books, but that government was recently overthrown by the Houthi rebels. The Houthis are a Shiite Muslim insurgency that’s supported by the Iranian theocracy.
Its goal is to change Yemen into a caliphate that’s ruled by descendants of Mohammed. More moderate spokesmen for the Houthis say that Sharia should be a source for Yemen’s laws, but not the only such source. Meanwhile, large portions of the country are controlled by al-Qaeda, which follows strict interpretations of Islamic law.
Yemen’s constitution calls it an Islamic nation and says that Islam is the official state religion. Denouncing this religion is punishable by death. Perhaps un-coincidentally, more than 99 percent of the Yemeni population self-identifies as Muslim.
Out of all these states, Iran is a straight-up Islamic theocracy. The Supreme Leader of Iran is the Ayatollah Khameini, a Muslim cleric without parallel in the country. Laws in Iran are explicitly drawn from Muslim Sharia code, with an extra helping of civil laws added on top.
Sudan is officially Islamic according to its government and legal code, which integrates Sharia law. The country is 96 percent Muslim and approximately three percent Christian. Christians are brutally persecuted, and the World Atlas records that “Sudan leads the world as the most difficult country for Christians since freedom of religion or belief is systematically ignored.”
Even the breakaway part of the country in the South, which wishes to return to British-style leadership, has been struggling to eliminate Sharia from its legal system.
Somalia officially imposed Sharia on its citizens in 2009. One minister said at that time, “Islamic Sharia is the only option to get solutions for the problems in this country.”
While there are other religions that are tolerated to some degree in Somalia, less than one-tenth of one percent of the country’s citizens follow them. In December 2015, the country banned Christmas celebrations because “having Muslims celebrate Christmas is not the right thing,” as one official put it, insisting that Christmas was “not in any way related to Islam.”
Even hotels were obligated to prevent guests from celebrating the holiday. Despite all this, the al-Shabaab terrorist group believes that the country is still not Islamic enough and wishes to impose an even harsher version of Sharia law on the parts of the country it controls.
And finally, Iraq, which was not included in the revised version of Trump’s executive order, is explicitly Islamic according to its new constitution written in 2005. The second article of that document declares, “Islam is the official religion of the State and is a fundamental source of legislation. No law that contradicts the provisions of Islam may be established.”
It’s true that there are protections for other religions, as long as the superiority of Islam is recognized. Some Iraqi clerics have been pushing for stricter adherence to Sharia, but this would begin to raise the question of whether Shiite or Sunni Muslims should dominate in the country.
As one can see, Islam is about as separate from the government of these states as chocolate is from a Hershey bar. It should be noted that no one describes Israel as a “Jewish-majority state,” even though 75 percent of its population is Jewish. Typically only the media refers to it as simply a “Jewish state.”
To refer to the above countries as “Muslim-majority” when people of other religions are oppressed the way they are in these nations is to suggest religious freedoms are present when clearly they’re not.
Once again, the liberal media are afraid to go into the territory known as “politically incorrect,” despite this area being where the truth lies. For the foreseeable future, it will be up to conservatives to correct them on this matter (and others as they see fit).
~ Liberty Planet
