America's Sharia Hysteria

by Reza Aslan (The Daily Beast)

Sharron Angle is just the latest politician to stir up anti-Muslim feelings. Reza Aslan on the wacky movement to ban Sharia law in the U.S.

We all knew Nevada’s Republican Senatorial candidate Sharron Angle was a bit loony. After all, this is the woman who said that rape and incest victims who become pregnant should be forced to have their babies so as to turn their “lemon situation into lemonade.”

But when Angle suggested last week that certain American cities like Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas, have been taken over by a “militant terrorist situation” wherein Muslims have instituted Sharia law upon its residents, many people were left scratching their heads at what she could possibly have meant.

It’s not just that Dearborn is—last anyone checked—still under the purview of the United States Constitution, or that there is no place in America called Frankford, Texas (I’m not kidding, look it up). It’s the rather bizarre notion that there may be a city in this country where the Constitution does not apply. “It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States,” Angle said about the real Dearborn and the imaginary Frankford.

Angle is right. There is something fundamentally wrong with this idea—it’s not true. There is no city or municipality in this country where Islamic law has taken hold. And yet, Angle is not the only one sounding the alarm over an imminent Muslim takeover of America. Indeed, now that the screeching over the building of the Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan seems to have died down, a new battle cry is arising from the radical anti-Muslim fringe: American Muslims, they say, are trying to replace the Constitution with Sharia!

Now I admit that we Muslims are a pretty powerful bunch. But in all the secret Muslim gatherings I have attended to discuss our plans for destroying democracy and taking over the White House (we meet every Friday night directly atop Ground Zero), we have come to the conclusion that we will need to raise our numbers from the 1% of the US population we currently represent, to at least 2% before we can begin stoning people at random...(MORE)