An Education About Shariah From an Islamic Law Expert

Episode #25 Transcript: Sumbul Ali-Kalamari

John Reed: [00:00:00] Right now you're probably someplace where a body of civil and criminal laws dictates how citizens and visitors must behave, and what happens if you don't comply? It's pretty likely that those secular laws are at least in part, based on religious tenets, “thou shalls; thou shall nots,” you know, things like that.

[00:00:24] While one may answer to a higher power for religious transgressions with some very hot and long-term consequences, courts, judges, and other government venues are the authorities we depend on to dispense justice in the here and now. But to assume that faith-based laws have no place in Western society is ignorant.

[00:00:44] And if there's one thing the West does really well, it's ignoring and relegating non-Judeo-Christian traditions. Today's guest is here to not only educate us about Islamic law, Shariah, but also dispel many conceptions rooted in just sheer ignorance. Sumbul Ali is a Muslim American lawyer who grew up in California at a time when Islam was even more misunderstood than it is now.

[00:01:08] Because of that, she became a de facto ambassador and translator of her faith, a corporate lawyer by training. She holds an additional degree in Islamic law and has written three books, “The Muslim Next Door: the Qur'an, the Media, and That Veil Thing,” which I think is such a great title; “Growing Up Muslim: Understanding the Beliefs and Practices of Islam”; and probably the book that's most pertinent to our discussion today, “Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It's Not Taking Over Our Country.”

[00:01:37] I will admit that Islamic law is a topic I've wanted to discuss on Sticky Lawyers for some time, and I'm thrilled to welcome Sumbul to the podcast. So, hello, Sumbul.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:01:47] Hello and thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

John Reed: [00:01:50] It is my treat. Let's start with the basics. I'll give you a softball question. What is Shariah?

[00:01:56] What are its origins, and why is it so hard for us to talk about?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:02:02] Yeah, an easy question, right?

John Reed: [00:02:03] Softball.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:02:04] So the word Shariah has no fixed meaning, and I think that has caused a lot of the misunderstandings and problems. So, you know, when I was growing up Muslim, I never learned this word, Shariah. Most Muslims I knew didn't learn this word, Shariah.

[00:02:17] We learned the things that most kids growing up in a faith learn, which is, you know, respect your parents. Do your homework, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal. And we didn't learn words like Shariah and jihad, which are unfortunately so prevalent in the public discourse now, and that there have been studies of Muslims asking Muslims to define Shariah, and they stumbled through.

[00:02:38] I mean, most Muslims cannot define Shariah. So, part of the problem is that it has no fixed meaning. Loosely, Shariah just means Islam. Literally the word, literal word Shariah is the Arabic word for the road to the watering place. And if you're in the desert, which is where Islam was born and what is now Saudi Arabia, you definitely want to be on the road to water. In religious terms, it's the road that we should follow to follow God's path.

[00:03:10] So it's the righteous path. It's the path that God wants us to follow or the way of God, you could say. So that's what Shariah means. Shariah law is actually kind of a Western construct, and it's a misnomer because that implies that it's law the way we think of law, which is enforceable and rigid, and that is not what Shariah is or has been for its 1400 years of history.

[00:03:35] Before I get into the nitty-gritty, you asked me why is it so hard to talk about it, right? So, one of the problems is that when Islam was born, Muhammad, who was preaching Islam, at first, he didn't think of himself as preaching a near religion. He thought he was preaching the religion of Abraham, which is the religion of the worship of one God.

[00:03:56] So he was very familiar with Judaism, Christianity; they had been around for a while. He had Christian relatives, he had colleagues who were Jewish, and he saw himself as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Now for Western Europeans, they didn't know anything about Islam. How could they, right? Cuz they were in Western Europe.

[00:04:17] Islam was in Arabia. They had no idea what it was because they were primarily Christian. Then some Jewish. They assumed that it was a false religion. This is what all religions assume of religions that come after them, that they're false or cults. Right? So Western medieval Christians in the seventh century assumed that Islam was a false religion.

[00:04:40] That the only way that it could be spreading so fast is because it must be that Muslims were spreading it by the sword and forcing people to convert because why else would it spread? And they didn't really know what Muhammad preached. They didn't know what Islam said. So, they came up with all these tall tales.

[00:04:59] [00:05:00] They assumed that Muslims had purple skin or blue skin or black skin. They thought of Muhammad as the antichrist or possibly a runaway Catholic bishop who had gone away to start his own religion. I mean, they had all these sorts of tall tales, and those tall tales became fixed into Western European culture so that they infused the historical narratives, but also literature and art.

[00:05:26] And they're the same kinds of tall tales that still permeate our television screenings and our films and our internet. So, I mean, we've inherited, in America, we've inherited this tradition of looking at Islam as the enemy from the Western Europeans.

[00:05:41] Interestingly enough, half —up to half of Christians in the world actually didn't live in Western Europe. They lived in the Middle East, under Muslim rule. And those Christians wrote in Syria, which European and American scholars didn't read. They didn't study it until very recently. And they are starting to study it now. And the picture from Christians who were living in Muslim land, it's very different.

[00:06:06] It's not “Muslims are the enemy” because they married Muslims, they interacted with them, they had business transactions, they had colleagues, and so it was a very different picture. But we have inherited our views of Islam from the Western Europeans who never met Muslims except on the battlefield. So that's why given this historical framework, it's so hard to talk about Shariah and Islam in general because anything that contradicts this worldview that Islam is the enemy is not believed, it's easily thrown out.

[00:06:40] When we get facts that challenge our worldview, human beings, we throw out the facts. We don't throw out our worldviews for the most part. That's why it's been difficult to talk about, and that's why actually I wanted to write this book. That was the long answer, John.

John Reed: [00:06:55] That was perfect. It's all good. I appreciate it.

[00:06:58] Well, let me ask you this. I am forever fearful that I'm not saying things correctly. So, would it be better to refer to our topic as Islamic law as opposed to Shariah, given Shariah's broad, sometimes indefinable definition?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:07:14] No, that's a good question. And honestly, sometimes I don't know what to call it because I have a degree in Islamic law, but my own Islamic law professor, he's the one who said, “nah, Islamic law is a misnomer. We shouldn't call it Islamic law.”

[00:07:27] So I would say it's okay with a caveat. It's okay to say Islamic law, but just a caveat that it's not law the way people thought. Shariah is not really Shariah law. Shariah is a religious concept that means the way of God. This was translated into a Shariah-based legal system that operated for about 1300 years.

John Reed: [00:07:48] So Shariah is derived from the Quran and the Sunnah, the teachings of the prophet. Fiqh expands Shariah through interpretations from Islamic Juris Muftis. Did I get that correct?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:08:03] Yes. So, to put it another way, Muslims knew that they had to follow the way of God. This is early Muslims in the seventh century. And when the prophet was alive, they just asked the prophet, what's the way of God?

[00:08:15] But when the prophet died, what do you do? How do we know what the way of God is? And so, they looked at the Quran, which Muslims believe is a literal word of God. Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel brought God's words to Muhammad and Muhammad's followers wrote them down. And all these bits of writing eventually turned into the Quran.

[00:08:35] So the early Muslims had the Quran to answer their questions, and they also had the words and deeds of their prophet Muhammad, which were written down, as best as people could write them down. But you know, the historical record is always fallible, right? So, they used the Quran, they used the words and deeds of the prophet to find the answers to, well, what do we do to be on the path of God?

[00:08:57] On the way of God? If they couldn't find the answers in the Quran and Sunnah, then they started interpreting them to come up with new answers and new rules, and they had all kinds of conclusions. And these interpretations on the religious text, you're right, is called Fiqh, which means understanding.

[00:09:17] And the Fiqh is not rules. It is a mass of debates, arguments, and contradictory opinions; the tens of thousands of books on their educated guesses on what should we do to be on the way of God.

John Reed: [00:09:35] That is a great setup for where I want to go next. And that is, I want to compare certain principles and foundations of common law to Islamic law— asterisk— what we're calling Islamic law. The first is this idea of what we call precedent or stare decisis, that in a previous ruling, particularly from a federal and state appellate court, that there's a precedent, there's already an established rule of law that judges, courts will follow in later similar cases, and that's not the same in Islamic jurisprudence.

[00:10:13] I wanted you to explain that.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:10:15] Yeah. So, what happened in the Shariah-based legal system? How did it develop? Well, if I were a Muslim living in the seventh, eighth centuries, and I had a question like, how do I pray? Or can we get divorced? I would go to an Islamic scholar, a religious scholar, a Legal scholar you could say, and I would ask him or her.

[00:10:36] There were women's scholars too. The question like, can I get divorced? What circumstances are there? And the mufti, the legal scholar, would go through and see, well, is there a consensus on this issue? In the Quran or the Sunnah? You know, does the Quran or the Sunnah say anything on this issue? By the way, there was historically only legal consensus on like 1% of issues that came up.

[00:11:00] So 99% of Islamic law does not have a consensus. But you know, as a mufti I would look to see if there was a consensus on the issue. If there wasn't, then I would use independent reasoning to interpret the legal texts. And I could use analogy, for example, since grape wine is prohibited in the Quran, then I would say, well, date wine is prohibited as well.

[00:11:23] You know, I'd use all kinds of tools of independent reasoning to come up with a conclusion as a mufti. That's what I would tell this person. So, this was happening all over Muslim lands where people were going to their muftis asking them questions. The muftis were coming up with these legal decisions, and what they came up with was a fatwa.

[00:11:45] And a fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion by a recognized Islamic scholar using an accepted methodology that is still the definition of a fatwa. And so, all these muftis around Muslim lands were coming up with these fatwas, and they were selling books recording these fatwas, and it's the mass of these fatwas that comprises the fiqh.

[00:12:08] So if a fatwa was agreed with, then it might become a majority opinion. It might even become a consensus. If people didn't agree with the fatwa, then it might become a minority opinion, or it might just fizzle away altogether. All the fatwas, amazingly enough, were considered equally valid. So even if one religious scholar came to one conclusion and another came to another conclusion, as long as they had followed a learned acceptable methodology, then they were considered both right. So as a Muslim, if I didn't like what the first scholar said, I could go to somebody else and see if I could get a different opinion.

John Reed: [00:12:46] That's what I was going to ask you. You know, another principle of common law and certainly U.S. jurisprudence is judicial estoppel. So, if I go to one judge and that judge adjudicates my case, I'm foreclosed from pursuing that case anew with another judge who might make a different decision.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:13:04] So you could have one fact pattern and you could have lots of different legal conclusions, lots of different legal decisions on that same or similar fact matter.

[00:13:15] And you could, you know, keep going to various legal scholars to see if you could get an opinion that you liked best. And also, suppose my husband and I decided, okay, we want a divorce; we're going to go to a mufti. And we both agreed to abide by what the mufti says, or suppose like enter into a contract with somebody and we have a dispute, and we agree, okay, let's go to a mufti, a legal scholar, and have him decide who's right, what the outcome should be.

[00:13:45] Now, if the mufti comes up with a decision and the other party says, “I don't like that decision, I'm not going to follow it through, after all,” I could go to a judge to have the decision enforced. Now, and this is where it's interesting that there's no stare decisis. The judge or the qadi wouldn't be bound by previous legal decisions.

[00:14:06] Instead, the judge would look at the mass of a fatwas, the mass of fiqh on this particular subject, whatever he or she, there were women judges too, whatever he thought was relevant to our case, and he would make a decision based on whatever fatwa or fiqh was applicable. It wouldn't matter to him what some other judge had said about a similar case.

[00:14:30] So there was no stare decisis in the Shariah-based legal system, and that gave judges a great deal of flexibility. So, what was the hallmark of Islamic law was this legal pluralism, right? Because you had a lot of different legal decisions on the same pattern, and also there was legal flexibility because the judge could look at your particular situation and take into account things like custom and hardship and necessity; things, which changed over time and allowed the judge to be flexible and be responsive in accordance with those changes.

[00:15:09] So legal flexibility and legal pluralism were both really hallmarks about the Islamic legal system.

John Reed: [00:15:15] So there's mufti shopping, like there's forum shopping. Yeah. But is there also judge shopping? So yeah, I've gone to the mufti. I don't like the ruling from the mufti. I go to the judge. The judge enforces something against me. Can I then go to another judge to revisit the issue?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:15:35] That's a good question. I think practically speaking, that didn't really happen because this is a long time ago, and communities pretty much ruled themselves. You know, you had maybe a ruler, but distances were huge in those days. There was no standardized nation-state or national law.

[00:15:51] So you had regional judges who knew their communities. So, typically you wouldn't have a lot of judges that were within, I don't know, riding dis, I mean travel distance, walking distance. So, yeah. But the difference was that the qadi or the judge was actually, it was part of the community in which the disputants lived.

[00:16:15] And so the Islamic system, the purpose wasn't really to say, this person's right and this person's wrong. There's a legal maxim that says, amicable settlement is best. So, what the judge would often say is, “Well, you're more right, and you're less right,” “or you're not quite as right as he is.” And in fact, the legal system didn't have a zero-sum equation on this.

[00:16:42] They didn't say, okay, he's right, and he's wrong. The Islamic legal system has a five-tiered gradation on whether things are allowed or not allowed or forbidden or neutral or recommended or discouraged. And so that's how they thought of these decisions.

[00:16:56] If two disputants came to the court, they would not necessarily say, you're right, and you're wrong. But they'd say, “Well, this is recommended. That was necessary. You're more right; he's less right. Let's reach a settlement, and you guys still have to live together in the same community. So, it's best that you work it out.”

John Reed: [00:17:12] So it's all community harmony based as opposed to individually targeting someone.

[00:17:18] That's probably an unfair statement, but I like the sentiment of it.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:17:21] Yeah. Yeah. That was the goal. I mean, obviously, you know, I'm talking about it. This is how the system was made to work. No system is free of corruption, obviously, and I'm sure throughout 1500 years of history, I'm sure you know, sometimes it worked better than other times, but it's I think, the longest-running, continually developed legal system in the world.

John Reed: [00:17:43] And you mentioned enforcement. So, in these communities, if I want to enforce my judgment from the judge, if you've got this kind of community harmony bent to it, That's the pressure to conform as opposed to some policeman or sheriff or whoever that's going to carry out the judgment. Is that fair?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:18:05] Yes, it is fair.

[00:18:06] Because there were no police forces. There was very little way of policing, and so people had to know what to do and go to their local authorities and ask them for advice. So that's how it happened.

John Reed: [00:18:18] I'm also glad you brought up the term fatwa, because it's gotten a bad rap and I don't mean to be smug about that.

[00:18:26] Certainly in light of the recent attack on Salman Rushdie.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:18:29] Yeah.

John Reed: [00:18:30] You know, you also mentioned the word jihad as a word that you learned later in life. Are those part of this centuries-old disinformation campaign as well, this Western view of fatwa and jihad, when they don't really mean what they mean?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:18:45] Well, I think the attitudes are 1400 years old.

[00:18:49] The kind of appropriation of Islamic terms at large is a new thing and has happened because of our internet and our media. So, fatwa and also, you know, frankly because of Muslims, you know, Khomeini is the one who gave fatwa a bad name. His fatwa on Salman Rushdie, the death sentence was rejected by the majority of, the vast majority of Islamic scholars in the world.

[00:19:16] They didn't necessarily say people were wrong to ban the book. And, of course, we have a lot of book banning in the West as well, but the vast majority of Islamic scholars said that it was a flawed fatwa and he didn't follow the correct methodology and that it was not correct that he could issue a death sentence on Salman Rushdie.

[00:19:38] Khomeini's so-called fatwa was not really religiously based. I mean, he said it was, he based it on the ancient crime of Apostasy, which was an abeyance. It hadn't been used for centuries, but it wasn't religiously based. It was politically motivated. Khomeini had wanted to burn bridges with the West.

[00:19:55] He wanted to revenge against Rushdie who had caricatured him and made fun of him. And by all accounts, he had never even read the book. And Khomeini by then, I think was in his mid-eighties, so a crotchety old person by then. And this is what he did, which was terrible. It was a terrible thing. And I feel like, you know, I'm constantly having, I mean, and it had repercussions too.

[00:20:18] I think it gave rise to a few other countries implementing apostasy laws. Even though apostasy in ancient Islam was actually not just leaving the religion, but also waging war against the Muslim community. That's not what people think of apostacy. So certainly not what Salman Rushdie did, right? He didn't wage war against the Muslim community.

[00:20:39] Then he also recanted and repented, which should have been a defense, but many didn't accept it. So, there are all kinds of problems with that. It was a political issue and, unfortunately, it gave rise to this idea that a fatwa is a death sentence. And it also gave rise to this idea that somehow Muslims are against free speech and everybody else isn't.

[00:21:00] Whereas there's actually nothing in Islam that prohibits free speech. And in fact, if Islam hadn't been tolerant of free speech, then we couldn't have had the development of the Shariah-based legal system because you have all these contradictory, argumentative debates on religion.

John Reed: [00:21:17] I was gonna ask you, we've talked about, essentially, terms that apply to a Muslim majority community.

[00:21:26] As you said earlier, there were a lot of Christians and Jews that lived in Muslim-majority communities. How were they treated under Islamic law? What rights did they have relative to their Muslim neighbors?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:21:40] Well, you know, interestingly in the Quran, the word Muslim does not mean Muslim the way we think of Muslims as followers of Islam. In the Quran, Muslim actually means it includes Jews and Christians, and other monotheists.

[00:21:57] So essentially it means Muslim means someone who submits to God. That's it. So, Muslims and Islamic law and everybody throughout the centuries have always accepted Judaism and Christianity as part of Islam. Muslims believe in all the Judeo-Christian prophets, Noah, Adam, Moses, Jesus. We say peace be upon him after we say the name of Muhammad, but we also say peace be upon him when we say the names of Jesus and Moses. And also, the Quran says, you don't need to be Muslim to go to heaven— Muslim, the way we think of Muslim. The Quran says the Jews, Christians, Sabians, who were monotheists at the time, and all those who believe in God and do good deeds, will go to heaven, which really for a seventh-century ancient religious text is pretty open-minded.

[00:22:47] And the Quran contains at least seven statements, forbidding forced conversion, the most famous of which, it's probably there is no compulsion in religion. But at least seven separate statements explicitly saying that you cannot force people to convert. And this was one of those 1% of the issues that was of consensus.

[00:23:10] Everybody agreed on it. There was no argument in Islamic law about this. There was absolute agreement that you could not force people to convert. So, when Muslims took over what was previously the Eastern Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, they didn't force people to convert. They pretty much let other religious communities retain their own religious laws and cultures.

[00:23:31] It was Muslims who were bound by the Shariah-based legal system. I mean, there were laws that applied to everybody, like the ruler-issued laws, like on market regulations and speed limits and taxation and stuff like that that applied to everyone. But when it came to religious laws, these things were separate.

[00:23:49] And since Muslims could choose, as you said, John, go mufti shopping, it was really easy for Jews and Christians to say, I'm going to go to my minister, or I'm going to go to my rabbi. And so, in Muslim lands, historically, even though Muslims are not allowed to drink alcohol, Jews were allowed to make wines and drink it. Even though Muslims are not allowed to eat pork, Christians could raise pigs and sell the meat and consume it. Even though Zoroastrians in Muslim lands had a tradition of intermarriage with siblings and close relatives, and that is forbidden in Islam, but they allowed Zoroastrians to do it because it was their religious culture and law. The way that the whole legal system was structured, which is legal pluralism, made it easy to tolerate other minority communities within it.

John Reed: [00:24:42] Well, and you just hit on the word that, of course, resounds heavily in this whole conversation, which is tolerance. You've got the teachings of the prophet. I did not know, and I appreciate the education and the definition of Muslim, that it's basically monotheistic as opposed to someone who follows Islam.

[00:24:58] And so I can see totally where tolerance is embedded in the faith, and then it comes out in the jurisprudence as well. Let me ask you this. There are of course, different groups within Islam—Sunni, Shia—and I'm wondering if there's any distinction or different treatment or different interpretation of Islamic law amongst different groups.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:25:23] There's a very little difference between Sunni and Shia. I have a friend who was like 40 years old before she asked her dad, are we Sunni or Shia? But there are no actually theological differences between Sunni and Shia. About 85 to 90% of the Muslims in the world are Sunni.

[00:25:43] Ten to fifteen percent are Shia. The split happened when Muhammad died; there was a debate on who would be the next leader of the Muslim community, and one group said that leadership should stay in the prophet's family. And the other group said, no, the leadership be chosen by consensus or election, if you will.

[00:26:03] The group that wanted the consensus is the one that prevailed. The other group didn't. The group that wanted leadership to stay were then the family of the prophet eventually developed into the Shia, and the group that wanted consensus eventually developed into the Sunni. So, the thing that divided them was just who should have authority in their religion.

[00:26:26] They don't disagree about God, but they disagree about who should have authority. And the Shia have always recognized the descendants of the prophet as having the authority to make the rules. The Sunni have always said, no, it's the Islamic scholars who should make the rules and the religion. Now, because the prophets line died out after 1415 descendants, since then, authority has rested in the religious scholars, in the Shia tradition as well.

[00:26:54] So practically speaking, there's not that much of a difference. These days the religious authority is in the Islamic scholars. A small exception is the Ismaili community. They have the Aga Khan who they believe is the descendant of Prophet Muhammad. The Ismailis are a small division of the Shia, and so they follow the Aga Khan.

[00:27:16] But otherwise, for the huge majority of the Muslims in the world, authority rests with the religious scholars. So, they both develop their own separate fiqh books. You know, the Sunni scholars develop their fiqh, the Shia scholars develop their fiqh, but practically speaking, they have parallels, and both traditions, they don't vary all that much.

[00:27:37] Most of us grow up going to mosques that have both Sunni and Shia attending.

John Reed: [00:27:44] From what you tell me, whether I go to fiqh one or fiqh two, I can still do my mufti shopping to find the judgment I like or the rationale that I like. So just different sets of analogies and reasonings I would imagine.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:27:56] Yes. And actually, you know, not everyone would agree with me on this, but you know, sometimes I like a Shia rule better and sometimes I like the Sunni rule better, and I can choose.

John Reed: [00:28:05] You've made a point a couple times, which is great to emphasize, that both legal scholars and judges can be women. Again, from my ignorant, longstanding centuries-old western ignorance view, we see depictions of women in Muslim communities as being second-class citizens, being subordinate to men. I'm just wondering if Islamic law does treat women differently than men in some way.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:28:37] So what I like to tell people, first of all, is these days what we tend to do in our American, European media is compare women in ascendant cultures to women or, uh, basically like non-Muslim women here in wealthy countries to Muslim women over there, overseas, in poor countries, okay? And we say, “Oh, look! See, they're in bad shape.”

[00:29:03] So what I say is, look, if you really want to compare what Muslim women, if Muslim women are oppressed or not, and you compare them to other women, why don't you look at American Muslim women? So, when you compare American Muslim women to American non-Muslim women, American Muslim women are doing very well.

[00:29:22] They are the second most educated faith group in the United States. Just after Jewish American women. Muslim women have the most parity of income with men of any faith group. And these are devout people, many of them. So that's when you're comparing apples and apples, right? If you're comparing American Muslim women to, oh, Yemeni Muslim women, that's apples to oranges because poverty and traditional culture and patriarchal cultures, pre-industrialized societies, all that matters.

[00:29:54] When it comes to the status of women and when there's poverty, women disproportionately suffer. That's the first thing I say. Also, I just have to say this, many people are shocked when I tell them that just in modern times, 14 Muslim women have been presidents or prime ministers of Muslim populations.

[00:30:13] And how many American women have been president?

John Reed: [00:30:18] Uh, quite a bit fewer, actually, yeah.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:30:21]  It's really funny because people are shocked and they want me to write down the names. And I always say Google them, they're presidents. Also, last I counted, there were 18 Muslim-majority countries that had more women in their legislatures than in Congress, than our Congress.

[00:30:37] You know, we hear about the oppression; we don't really hear about the other people overseas. Now, in terms of the law, what I always tell people is that Islam was feminist. And, of course, they take it like it's some sort of a joke, but the status of women is one of the main themes of the Quran. And the Quran was very concerned with raising the status of women. If you look at the Quran now, it may not have equality the way we expect there to be equality. So let me give you an example. In the inheritance laws in the Quran, which are among the most specific, a lot of the Quran is elusive. It's poetry, it refers to other things. But the inheritance verses are quite specific. And what they say is that if someone dies and leaves a son and a daughter, then the son gets two-thirds of the estate and the daughter gets one-third. And this has been used to say, “Oh my God, how sexist. Women are worth only half the men in Islam.”

[00:31:33] But keep in mind, this was the seventh century, and in the seventh century, women usually got nothing. If you look at Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters were going to get nothing because the estate went to the nearest male heir. For Downton Abbey fans, you know, the three girls and the wife were going to get nothing.

[00:31:53] It was going to go to the nearest male relative. So, for the seventh century, for the Quran to say a daughter gets a third of the estate was shocking, particularly because the son was the one who took care of the tribe, who went to war, who provided for the entire family and the clan. He needed that money.

[00:32:12] The daughter didn't go to war. She didn't provide for anybody but herself. So, the seventh-century Arabian, this was a wildly shocking idea that the daughter should get a third of the estate and it was wildly feminist for the time. Now if I have a son and daughter, do I have to still do that now today?

[00:32:31] One of the ways that you interpret the Quran, look at the reason for revelation. If the reason for revelation is no longer extant, then you can reinterpret. So, the reason for revelation of these inheritance verses was again, it was a tribal-based community. The son was the strongest male who took care of the clan and the tribe and the family. He went to war.

[00:32:51] This is no longer the case. My son and my daughter, I think, have almost equal chances of success. So, in that case, it's okay for me to leave half and half, half to my son and half to my daughter. I don't have to comply with those two-thirds, one-third provisions because if they were feminists for the time, then they shouldn't be used to exercise sexism today.

[00:33:15] You know, unfortunately in every religion there are literalists, right? And people who are ignorant of the methodology of interpretation, even clerics. And so, it's very easy to just open up the Quran, see the verse, and say, yep, this is what we have to do. But that is not the only interpretation.

John Reed: [00:33:33] We've talked a lot about Muslim-majority countries, communities.

[00:33:39] Can you speak to the application, the invocation of Islamic law by a Muslim in a non-Muslim majority community? Can that person avail themselves of Islamic law? I mean, I can't file a complaint in California or Michigan and demand choice of law for Shariah, and we'll talk about that even being banned in certain states in a little while.

[00:34:04] But I'm just kind of curious, and maybe this is the transition to Shariah and daily life now.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:34:09] Yeah, so in its structure, the fiqh is very similar to the Jewish halakha. The structure of Islam is more similar to Judaism than Christianity, although I always think of Islam as right in between. But Shariah actually says, Muslims must follow the law of the country in which they reside.

[00:34:30] So early on in the seventh century when the prophet Muhammad and his followers were being persecuted at the city of Mecca, he didn't fight back. And one of the ways that they dealt with this persecution was that they migrated to other places, and one of the places they migrated was what is now Ethiopia.

[00:34:47] And there was a Christian king there who welcomed them. And so, the question arose even in the seventh century, is do Muslims have to follow Shariah or do they follow the law of the country in which they live? And the overwhelming answer was, you have to follow the law of the place in which you live. And some scholars said you could adjust your practices, which is kind of wild.

[00:35:11] I mean, basically Islamic scholars just think you can adjust your Islamic practices in order to align with the lands in which you're now living. Some said that you can move away if you're not comfortable with the laws of that country. But they all said you cannot try to overthrow the country in which you live in order to implement any kind of Islamic law or Shariah. You have to follow the laws of the place in which you live. And so, this is something that has been established from the very beginnings of Islam. And in fact, Islamic scholars always considered lands in which Muslims could freely practice their religion as abodes of peace or even abodes of Islam.

[00:35:51] So this idea of an Islamic state is really interesting. It didn't really come up until the 20th century because, before that, Muslim scholars would say, if you're living in a place where you can practice your religion, then that's enough. So, for me, I think the United States is a perfectly valid Islamic state because I can practice my religion here.

[00:36:08] As with everything else, of course, we're limited by American law and public policy. But in my personal life, I can follow my religion. I just always took that for granted. And I was actually kind of surprised when somebody asked me—this was a relative who said, you know, I know I can get a divorce here, but can I get a divorce under Islam?

[00:36:28] And it really kind of surprised me because I thought, well you live here, of course, you can get a divorce. But she wanted to sort of assuage her conscience, right? She wanted to be in line with American law, but also in line with Islamic law. And so, for people like that, people who are wondering, “Well, what should I do?

[00:36:44] Is it okay under Islam to get a divorce? Is it okay under Islam to leave everything to my daughter?” They can go theoretically any way. They can go to an Islamic scholar in the United States and get their opinion. They can also, if there's a dispute, they can go have arbitration. You know, in this country we can have anybody arbitrate.

[00:37:03] And there's a long tradition of religious communities going to their religious authorities to get arbitration. And Jews have been going to Jewish tribunals. Some Christians go to Christian tribunals. and certainly Muslims can go to mosques or other religious scholars in order to have them arbitrate and to give them advice on how to behave according to Islamic principles.

[00:37:24] It's, you know, interestingly enough, Shariah councils in Britain were actually established to help Muslim women get divorces because what was happening in England was that you're not required to register your marriage. And so, a lot of people didn't. But then when you wanted to get a divorce, you couldn't under the state, the state couldn't give you a divorce because they had no record of marriage.

[00:37:44] So if the husband was not cooperative, the woman was stuck. And so, the Shariah councils were set up in order to set up an authority that could give the woman a divorce under Islamic law.

John Reed: [00:37:55] You've mentioned inheritance, so estate planning and probate, if you will. You've mentioned divorce. What are the most likely areas that a Muslim in the modern age, let's say in the United States, let's keep it local, would go to a legal scholar to adjudicate or advise on? You know, criminal law is going to be taken care of by state and federal laws.

[00:38:23] And so I would imagine it's fairly rare if at all for Islamic law to govern that. But I'm kind of curious what the most common situations are for one to want to follow Islamic law.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:38:35] 90% of the Shariah, 90% of it is about personal devotion. It's about how you pray, how you fast. When you give charity, who to give charity to, how much. It's private law.

[00:38:48] Only about 10% is public law, which is transactions and offenses and torts, if you will. Only about one to 2% is what we might call criminal law. Most of Shariah is not stuff that was ever enforced, because it's personal devotional rules and guidelines. So as a Muslim here, it's really those rules that come up.

[00:39:11] Not rules, but those issues that come up. So that's why you're mentioning family law and estate planning because that is where they come up the most. A marriage and divorce is very common. You know the Islamic marriage contract is a bit different. So, the Islamic marriage contract in Islam, marriage is not a religious sacrament, it is just a contract.

[00:39:31] So if two people enter into a contract with witnesses, they are married. And the only difference is that Islamic marriage contract has to have what's called a mahr provision, M A H R. And that's the opposite of a dowry. So, the dowry used to be the bride's family giving the groom money to get her off the sand.

[00:39:54] The mahr is actually a gift from the groom to the bride so that she has her own separate property in the case of divorce or death. And if there is no mahr provision in an Islamic marriage contract, then one will be implied. So often, you know what comes up is this provision, this mahr provision, what should the bride get?

[00:40:14] And if the husband isn't paying, then how do you enforce payment? And as long as these contracts are not violating public policy, they're fine.

John Reed: [00:40:24] Are there instances where, let's say in a divorce situation there is a determination that the woman is to get a mahr. Probably didn't pronounce that correct, but

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:40:37] A mahr, Uhhuh.

John Reed: [00:40:38] And the husband says, No way, no how. I'm not going to.” Can the ex-wife go to a state court to enforce an Islamic law judgment? I'm wondering if there can be a blend of the two in order to reach a just conclusion.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:41:00] Yeah. So, the way I frame it often is to say most of the Shariah is about fairness and justice, and if you enter into a transaction that satisfies American law and public policy, if it also satisfies Shariah. That's fine. Right? We don't care. All we care about is that it satisfies American law. So as long as the contract, as long as what I'm trying to enforce is not somehow violating a policy, then yes, it absolutely can be enforced just like any other contract. You know, just like, you know, if I make a will that complies with Shariah and then there's a fight about the will after I die.

[00:41:41] And certainly my descendants can go to court and fight over it.

John Reed: [00:41:44] But can I take the ruling that was purportedly agreed to by both parties through Islamic legal scholars and submit that to a U.S. Court and say,” I just want to enforce this the way it is. We agreed to it and now the other party is breaching it,” or does it have to be re-litigated?

[00:42:04] I guess had there been instances where U.S. courts have adopted and enforced legal rulings from an Islamic judge?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:42:12] As you know, we can put in any contract what the governing law is going to be. And so, if two Americans enter into a contract and they say this contract is going to be governed by German law.

John Reed: [00:42:24] Mm-hmm.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:42:25] Then the court will have to interpret German law.

John Reed: [00:42:27] Okay.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:42:28] To enforce that contract or not. The same with any religious law. If two Jewish people go to a Jewish tribunal and have a decision made and then one tries to enforce it, the court will have to look at Jewish law to interpret that transaction, to see who was right, who was wrong. And it's no different with Shariah.

[00:42:48] It is always limited by American law and public policy, but it's like a different governing law where if two people go to a Shariah Council and the Shariah Council issues a ruling and one of them doesn't comply, and the other one takes them to court, then the judge, just as if it were German law, the judge would look at what Shariah says and decide which of those people is correct and how the contract or whatever it is, should be enforced.

[00:43:16] The key thing here is that if all folks tend to say, “Oh, see there's Shariah in our courts. Shariah's taking over the United States.” Well no. There's no Shariah that's being forced on anybody. These are people who willingly submit to Shariah arbitration, and then they're just going to get their transaction or contract or whatever it is enforced in our courts. Our courts are not imposing Shariah or using Shariah.

John Reed: [00:43:40] In our prior discussion, you told me about Islamic laws' prohibition of charging interest, and I'm fascinated by this. And I want to go through it with you again for our listeners' purposes. You know, you want to adapt to the law where you live as a Muslim, but you want to honor your faith. And so, this is where we can get all legal, technical. How one can enter into business transactions, where there might be interest, and kind of the creative lawyering to get around that so that everybody's happy. It all works, and both U.S. law and Shariah law are observed.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:44:20] Yeah. So Islamic finance, mostly it's, it's the same.

[00:44:26] Corporate law under Islam is mostly the same as what we understand corporate law and finance to be. There are only a couple of differences. One is that riba is prohibited, and riba is the Arabic word for usury. As with all religious things, the question is what's usury? Right. It's not necessarily interest, but in pre-Islamic Arabia, there used to be this tradition of doubling.

[00:44:56] So a lender would lend money to a borrower, and then when the loan became due, the lender would say, “Do you pay it today or do you double?” And if you couldn't pay it, then you owed double the amount. And this is really what the Quran was upset about. This practice of kind of enslaving the borrower and doubling and doubling and doubling the amount of the loan.

[00:45:18] So that for sure is usury. By analogy, you could say a really high compound interest is similar to doubling, and that wouldn't be allowed under Islam law either. Generally, scholars have allowed simple interest up to say 7%, and some scholars have said, well, it's not really interest, it's not even compound interest that's a problem.

[00:45:39] It's economic exploitation, and it's, and enslavement, it's injustice and unlawful gain. Those are the things that you have to look at rather than just a ban on interest. So, there's, you know, a question about what is that actually usury or not usury? But that's one thing that is not allowed in Islamic finance.

[00:45:58] The other thing is this concept of gharar, which is risk that is dependent on chance rather than scale. So, it's okay to take a risk and invest in an enterprise that you think is going to do well, to invest in the stock market. That's okay, but it's risk that comes from games of chance, but gambling that is not okay.

[00:46:20] You could say that life insurance is not okay because nobody knows when someone's going to die, and they're going to get money depending on a chance event. So that's also prohibited. So, in the United States, it's really easy for me not to go gamble. So gambling is definitely against Islam. Does that mean that no Muslims gamble? Well, no, of course not. You know, Muslims are like any other community of the world, but Islamic law does not allow gambling. As for interest, you know, I have a mortgage on my house. Under some interpretations of the law, I think that's okay. You know, I am adjusting to the country in which I live. Some scholars have said it's fine to take out loans and pay interest because this is our system.

[00:47:00] And you know, as long as there's no enslavement and usury, then okay. Other people would say, “No, I don't want to do interest.” And so, for that, there are Islamic banks, and you can restructure financial transactions in such a way that you don't pay interest. A lot of them can be profit sharing, structured as profit sharing.

[00:47:22] There can be various fees that are charged instead of interest. You know, if someone wants to buy a house and they don't want to take out a loan, what can happen is a group of people can buy the house. The people who want to buy it eventually can live in it, pay out rent, and eventually buy out the other people.

[00:47:40] Maybe that's one way to buy a house without actually taking out a loan. So, there are ways to structure financial transactions so that you don't have to pay interest. Sometimes it's just thinly disguised interest, but sometimes, you know, you can try to avoid the spirit of it.

John Reed: [00:47:56] See, what I love about this is we learn in law school, the best answer a lawyer can give is “it depends.” And I did not know that that answer was rooted in Islamic law, because it basically— between all of the fatwas and the creative lawyering—it all depends, but on good things, depends on the community, and on other things like that.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:48:17] Absolutely. Okay. So, it's interesting that you didn't know that it depends, is actually rooted at Islamic law. And this brings me to a really, really interesting thing that I learned when I was researching my book. There's always been a question of why did England develop common law when the rest of Europe developed legal systems based on Roman law? On Roman civil law. And there have been lots of rehashing and hashing about why this could have happened.

[00:48:44] And there's no good answer unless you look at Islamic law. Islamic law is a case-based system, right, John? In that way, it's very similar to common law. It's a case-based system. It's developed by scholars and judges. So, in the 12th century in England, Henry II was king, and there was no legal system in England, until the 12th century. Before that, English had trials by fire.

[00:49:08] Trials by water, which is basically they would throw you into the water, and if you sank, then you were innocent, and if you floated or swam, then you were guilty. The trial by fire was you had to walk through fire and not get injured. And if you could do that, then you were innocent.

John Reed: [00:49:22] Sounds fair.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:49:23] Yeah. So that was the legal system.

[00:49:25] Now, Henry II in the 12th century wanted to overhaul this system. At the same time that he was King of England, Roger II was King of Sicily. They were both Norman kings. They both shared personnel, court personnel. They talked; they had messengers going back and forth. They knew each other. Sicily had been ruled by Muslims for 200 years, and Roger II had left a lot of the Shariah-based legal system in place.

[00:49:51] He had left the infrastructure in place. He left the Shariah courts for the Muslims and the other courts for the Christians. And so, when Henry II wanted to overhaul the English legal system, Islamic law was 500 years old by then. It was sophisticated. It was quite well-developed. I mean, 500 years is longer than our country's been around, so it had been around for a long time.

[00:50:13] So it's really hard to believe that Henry II could have been completely uninfluenced by Roger II, his Norman king friend in Sicily who knew all about the Islamic legal system. So, it's very, very likely that when he came up with the English Common Law System, it was influenced in large part, if not based on the Islamic system.

[00:50:35] Isn't that interesting?

John Reed: [00:50:37]  It depends. I mean, it's fabulous. Just goes to show, and I've used the word over and over again during our conversation, the ignorance. You know, that if one were to step back and have Sumbul as a friend who could explain everything and do a fantastic job, then we would dispel all these myths and untruths and what have you, and see it for what it is.

[00:50:59] So talking about, you know, myths and untruths and things like that. In reading a little bit to get up to speed on these anti-Shariah law movements in states, I noticed that—talk about thin veils—they're heralded or they're promoted as anti-international law statutes that state and federal courts, state courts, for the most part, are not going to allow for the application of “international law” to resolve disputes.

[00:51:32] Where does this come from? Where's the threat? Why is it being perpetuated?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:51:36] So, when I wrote my first book, which came out in 2008, nobody knew this word, Shariah. I think I spent two paragraphs on it because as I said loosely, it just means Islam. And since my book was on Islam, what was the point? I'm talking about Shariah.

[00:51:51] Nobody knew it. In 2010 though, suddenly there were anti-Shariah protests. I was at one of my Stanford reunions at an author event, and this couple who were there for their 50th Stanford reunion came up to me and said, “We're really afraid that Shariah is taking over the United States.” And it was shocking to me, and that's actually why I thought, “Okay, I gotta write a book.”

[00:52:18] How did this happen? Like going from nobody knowing anything about it to an anti-Shariah protest? Well, it didn't happen by accident. In 2010, a lawyer named David Yerushalmi, who is part of the loose Islamophobia network in this country, which makes a ton of money and generates misinformation about Muslims. Yerushalmi decided that he wanted to introduce the idea of a scary Islamic law into the American discourse.

[00:52:46] Now he's a lawyer, and so the way that he decided to do this was to go to state legislatures and say, “You need to pass anti-Shariah legislation. Otherwise, Shariah is going to take over the country,” which as you know, is nonsense, right?

John Reed: [00:53:02] Sure.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:53:02] No religious law can take over our country. We have the first amendment, the establishment clause.

[00:53:07] Because we have our constitution, we have Congress. There's no way that Islamic law is ever going to take over the country. And he knows that, and he didn't care. His goal, as he admits himself, was just to raise the issue of a scary Islamic law and put it into that public discourse. And he was wildly successful, and he made a ton of money doing it.

[00:53:26] And to date, I think there have been anti-Shariah laws passed in 20 states.

John Reed: [00:53:33] Wow. Okay. I was looking at an old map then.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:53:36] Yeah. I think. But when I wrote my book, it was 14 states. But over 200 laws have been suggested or raised. Some of them would've made it a felony for me to say my prayers. Really ridiculous and a colossal waste of time because we don't need them.

[00:53:53] So the first laws, which mentioned the word Shariah were struck down, at least in Oklahoma. The case was litigated and the court struck down the anti-Shariah law as unconstitutional. So, in subsequent legislation, they took out the word Shariah and started to say all foreign law, which causes a whole host of problems.

[00:54:16] And there's still anti-Shariah laws; like you can see the record of the discussions and it's clearly aimed at preventing this mirage monster of Shariah. But they know that it would be unconstitutional. So, they're starting to either add different religions or they're just saying all foreign law. And these are also unconstitutional.

[00:54:37] They haven't been litigated, most of them, but the American Bar Association has come out super strongly against them because they violate not just the establishment clause, but also the contract clause. You know, if you can't take into account foreign law, then how can you enter into a contract? Or if I can't enter into a contract that's accepted by Shariah, then that's a violation of my constitutional rights.

[00:55:00] They violate the supremacy clause because you can't evaluate treaties in court if you can't look at foreign law. So, it's like a solution in search of a problem, right? Yep. And they've caused a lot of injustice. So, we were talking about the mahr previously. You know, Muslim women are entitled to their own separate property given to them by the groom, and that is part of the Islamic marriage contract.

[00:55:28] So there was one case in Kansas that came out in 2012 where a wife had fled her physically abusive husband, and she filed for divorce while she was in a women's shelter in Kansas. And under her Islamic marriage contract, he owed her $677,000 on divorce. That was the amount that they had agreed upon as the mahr, but the court refused to enforce the marriage contract because of Kansas' anti-Shariah law.

[00:55:57] And so this woman got like pennies. She got basically nothing, which was an injustice. And it's ironic because a lot of these, legislatures when they push for having these anti-Shariah laws passed, will characterize them as being feminist. Like we're preventing the oppression of women, and so we need to pass this anti-Shariah law.

[00:56:21] And yet more than once they've adversely affected women by preventing the Islamic marriage contracts from being enforced.

John Reed: [00:56:28] I don't know what to say to that. I'm, I just, I got nothing. Well, let's switch to a happier topic, one that you didn't have to study for. Let's talk about you. As I ask all of my guests, where did your motivation to become a lawyer come from?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:56:44] So, my parents were from India, and in their view, if you wanted to be successful, you could only be an engineer or a doctor. That's it. You try to do anything else, and you're an abject failure. So I am the most squeamish person you've ever met. I could never have been a doctor.

John Reed: [00:57:04] I'm with you on that one.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:57:06] Yeah. And I was an English major in college, and so I love languages, and I was also a math major. So I thought law would be the perfect combination of words and language and analysis. And so, I applied to law school, you know, thereby becoming a grave disappointment to my parents.

John Reed: [00:57:27] I was gonna say, I'm sorry you've been such a failure in your endeavors. So.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:57:32] Yeah. So, and all this time, you know, I was always asked about Islam and Muslims. You know, growing up I was pretty much the only Muslim that people around me had met. And so, I got all the questions. And when I went to college, it was even more intense because we were all living in the dorms.

[00:57:48] This was at Stanford, and I was in the dorm, and everybody knew what everybody did. And all of a sudden I was thinking, how am I going to pray five times a day without my roommate noticing? How am I going to figure out if there's pork in the dorm food when nobody knows what's in the dorm food? It was, you know, I was like, excuse me, how am I going to participate in the progressive drinking party that they had in my dorm without drinking any alcohol?

[00:58:13] Uh, progressive drinking party is not political. It's when you go from room to room.

John Reed: [00:58:17] No, no, I, I know. I, yeah. I've been to a few, and some people told me I had fun. So, uh, no, I know what you're mentioning.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:58:24] Yeah. You know, so all those things came up. And then I went to law school, and I started practicing corporate law, and that's when I started getting questions about books like, can you recommend any books on Islam?

[00:58:36] And there was nothing at the time. This was the nineties, there was nothing that was readable. So, I thought, well, I'll write a book. And so, when my husband's job took us to London, I did an LL.M. in Islamic Law from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, which was one of the few places in the West that you could get an LL.M. in Islamic law.

[00:58:57] And then I thought, okay, then I'll come back, and I'll start writing books. And so that's how I ended up where I am. It's funny because, you know, my fear of public speaking used to be greater than my fear of death, and yet, so here I am. I'm talking about a topic that shouldn't be controversial, but which is like a magnet for a lot of negative viewpoints and rhetoric.

John Reed: [00:59:21] Well, it's an important thing that you're doing, but let's go back. So, you practiced in corporate law. What does your practice look like today? How are you practicing? What are you doing outside of writing books and giving important discussions and presentations?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [00:59:35] Right now, I am working as pretty much a contract lawyer reviewing contracts.

[00:59:40] I took a lot of time off to raise my kids and to write books and went back after a while. But I'm really happy doing it. I'm hoping to write more books, but I think I am due for a second edition of my first one, so that's what I've been up to.

John Reed: [00:59:57] Fantastic. You've mentioned the 14^th-century history, 15^th-century history, the development of Shariah law. What impact did colonization have on Shariah law where we are today, I guess?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:00:11] So I think, you know, growing up in America, we don't really understand; I'm guilty of this. We don't really understand colonization very well. I think we grow up with this idea, this romantic idea of the 13 colonies, but almost 90% of Muslim lands were colonized by Western powers.

[01:00:28] Ninety percent. So just take a minute and let's just imagine if 90% of the Western world had been colonized by Muslims. The world might look different. Starting in the 18th century is when colonization started. There was, for a while there was a moment, tobacco boys where China, the Ottoman Empire, Europe; they're all kind of equally powerful, but Europe was able to get to the new world and get resources and colonize much of the rest of the world.

[01:00:55] So, colonization is the reason that there is no more Shariah in the world. Shariah is not the law of the land anywhere in the world today, not like it was for 1300 years. So, what happened under colonization was that resources of the colonized countries were taken to the home countries. The artisan classes were destroyed.

[01:01:16] The industrial sector was not able to develop. Local culture was destroyed, because you had the younger generation speaking the language of the colonizers, the older generations speaking their native languages. When Judaism and Christianity modernized in response to the Industrial Revolution, Islam was not able to because 90% of Muslim lands were subjugated.

[01:01:39] And that means that education was dismantled. You know, the British and Egypt abolished pre-education for boys and girls. Religious educational institutions like seminaries were dismantled, or they fizzled out for lack of funding. So, there was nobody to develop the fiqh. The scholar class became impotent, no longer could check the ruler.

[01:02:00] It used to be a system of checks and balances, where the scholars checked the ruler and the ruler checked the scholars, but the scholars became powerless. There were no jobs in Islamic law because the colonizers imposed secular laws on the native populations. The whole system became—the Shariah courts, the system of development of the law, the flexibility of the law—all that fell apart under colonization.

[01:02:25] So it dismantled the Islamic legal institutions, the Islamic educational institutions. That was the big deal. But the important thing about this is that it made the law abstract. And Shariah had always been a case-based practical law that was affected by things like geography and custom and hardship, right? Under colonization, it wasn't in practice; it just became abstract, and it became an ideology, which was a tragedy. Specific ways that colonization transformed the law. It was really interesting. India is a good example. Colonizers imposed European law codes because they were afraid that Islamic legal institutions would foment rebellion against the colonial regimes.

[01:03:09] And they were right to be afraid because the scholars had always checked the rulers and fomented rebellion against the rulers. So, colonizers impose European law codes, and colonizers also thought the British and India, for example, also thought that Shariah was too soft. And isn't that funny? Because Shariah has this reputation of being black and white and rigid and draconian and medieval. But the colonials thought it was too lenient and too flexible. British Governor Hastings in India denounced it because it was based on an abhorrence of bloodshed, and he thought that was reprehensible. So, what they did, they closed the secular law, the British in India, but they also said, okay, we'll also have Islamic law as well.

[01:03:50] And so what they did was codify it. They took bits and pieces of the fiqh rules, abridged them, put them in a statutory code, and then enforced it. In choosing one fiqh rule, you lost all the other ones. Usually, the ones that were beneficial for women because these were all men who were doing this. It rigidified Islamic law because instead of lots of different legal decisions on a single fact pattern, you had one code that was imposed on people.

[01:04:19] Also, you lost the distinctions between the various schools of thought of legal thought. There were lots of schools of legal thought that were all considered equally valid, and those went away. The difference between Sunni and Shia law went away because you had this one simple code. They also implemented stare decisis, which we talked about earlier.

[01:04:39] Islamic judges had not been bound by stare decisis, but under colonization they were. And so, they didn't have the discretion to be as flexible as they used to be. Also, punishments, the ones that we always hear about, the Islamic criminal punishments. The ones, yeah. Yes. But they became much harsher under colonization because what codification did, and what the colonizers did, was take the punishments and get rid of the myriad procedural limitations that restrict the implementation of those punishments.

[01:05:13] So that's what happened. The Shariah system with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, that was the end of the Shariah-based legal system.

John Reed: [01:05:22] What's hard to hear in that is so much of the study and the practice of law is practical. I mean, it's in the word, right? Practice of law. And so, to take out the opportunity to consider different situations and instead follow hard and fast rules, it's kind of contrary certainly to what Shariah law is all about, but also, quite frankly, other international jurisprudence.

[01:05:50] So, just another part of the past that we have to reckon with.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:05:53] Yeah. And we're still dealing with repercussions, you know. Colonization was a race-based enterprise.

John Reed: [01:06:01] Mm-hmm.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:06:02] The British and the French and the Dutch and the Portuguese, they saw it as the white man's, the same quote as the white man's mission to go civilize the savages.

John Reed: [01:06:11] Mm-hmm.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:06:12] And for centuries, Muslims were denigrated as being savages and backward, and those colonial stereotypes are still with us. You know, people ask me with remarkable frequency, people ask me why have Muslims always been backwards? And I always say, you know what? They invented coffee so rethink what you just said.

[01:06:37] But, uh, the other thing that colonialism did was really, really, really disrupt the organic development of women's rights. So, Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard, and he points out rightly that colonization stripped women of the rights that they'd always had under Islam.

[01:06:52] So the British in the 18th century went to India. They restricted the right of women to go to court because English women couldn't go to court in the 18th century. Muslim women could divorce, and they could own their own property, and they had legal personhood, all of which English women didn't have until the late 19th century. And so, when the colonizers, while they were accusing Muslims of being sexist, the colonizers went and stripped the Muslim women of all these rights. Yeah. Also, because they were constantly denigrating Muslims for being sexist, I think primarily because of the headscarf. What happened is that Muslim women couldn't develop women's rights on their own because if they tried to, they were seen as caving into the colonizers.

[01:07:33] You see? So if Chakravorty Spivak calls it white men saving brown women from brown men, it puts brown women in a quandary. Because, you know, if you want to develop women's rights, you know, your own countrymen are saying you're just caving into centuries of integration by the colonizers. But if you don't, then you're kind of stuck not developing women's rights.

[01:07:54] And it wasn't until the 1970s that women were kind of able to get past this wall that colonization put there. And the reason, ironically enough, was the Islamist movement because in two ways the Islamist one decided that girls had to go to school because education is a duty in Islam, and that includes for girls.

[01:08:15] So the Islamists, in Iran, for example, were very much responsible for getting girls into schools. And there are more women than men in colleges in Iran at the moment. The second way, the opposite thing happened is that people like Khomeini started taking away women's rights. Iran is not ruled by Shariah.

[01:08:34] Iran has a civil code that dates back, I think to the 1930s. And what they did was they just started taking away women's rights from the civil code. and also sticking in Islamic-sounding provisions. Also, not Shariah. Yeah. But what that did is open the door for Iranian women to say, “What are you doing? You can't take away my rights. Islam gives me those rights.”

John Reed: [01:08:55] Mm-hmm.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:08:56] And that way they were able to dispense with the colonizers as part of the equation and directly to the Iranian government. And Khomeini actually was eventually made to put back all the stuff that he had taken out.

John Reed: [01:09:09] Well, I'm gonna ask you a couple more questions if I may.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:09:12] Mm-hmm.

John Reed: [01:09:14] And they're going to be curve balls. Ready?

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:09:15] Okay. Also, if you want to talk about punishment, that's kinda fun too, just to say.

John Reed: [01:09:22] Um, as much as I'd like to, I'm actually running out of time here, so I apologize for that. But let me ask you this. I've read you are a Star Trek fan.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:09:33] Yes.

John Reed: [01:09:34] Many Trekkies revere that show because of its depiction of diversity and multiculturalism, not too different from what we've been talking about and what you're trying to achieve with your books and your speaking appearances.

[01:09:47] Is that what kind of drew you to Star Trek? I'm curious.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:09:52] Well, no. Well, I think what drew me to Star Track was that I had a huge crush on Captain Kirk.

John Reed: [01:09:57] Okay. All right. So you went from the, yeah. Okay. No, I don't know what to do with that either.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:10:04] But this is interesting. So, I watched reruns every so often when I was a kid, and Captain Kirk was my first crush.

John Reed: [01:10:11] Okay.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:10:12] But then when I was in law school, I'd come home, and I'd make dinner, and Star Trek was on every night at dinner time. So, I sat down and ate my dinner, and I watched Star Trek, and that was really the first time I had watched it seriously.

John Reed: [01:10:26] Mm-hmm.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:10:27] And I didn't think too much of it. I didn't go to Star Trek conventions or anything.

John Reed: [01:10:32] No.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:10:33] But when I started writing my first book, all these Star Trek examples started slipping into my writing, and I thought, what is going on? And I realized, well, it's because that show was about social justice. That was the purpose of the show. And it was about diversity, and it was about the idea that the unknown was not something to be feared and to be suspicious of. It was something to be embraced and explored. Aliens were not people to be feared, but to be communicated with and to develop friendships with. And it was about universal values. And so, I found myself using a lot of Star Trek examples to describe aspects of Islam and Islamic law and Muslims. That's how it happened.

John Reed: [01:11:16] Okay. I'd ask you about your interest in opera too, but I have absolutely nothing to contribute to the discussion because unless it's Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in the Marriage of Figaro spoof, I'm out.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:11:27] Wagner, I think it was Wagner.

John Reed: [01:11:29] It was a mix of things. It was, uh, Carmen and, you know, so Bizet's Carmen and Wagner and whatever else.

[01:11:36] So I think in terms of Looney Tunes, all my thoughts revolve around Looney Tunes. So just like Star Trek infused your thinking. Sumbul, I mentioned your books earlier and the specific names of them, and I assume listeners can find them on Amazon and other booksellers. Where else can people go to learn about you and what you want them to know? The real facts of Islamic law.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:11:58] I have a website which is muslimnextdoor.com, and I have some essays up. I have a blog. There are some videos of me, and I have links to media articles and essays that I've written as well. I just had one about Salman Rushdie. That's one way. And the books are really the main thing, though, like the “Demystifying Shariah” is the most up to date because it came out the most recently.

[01:12:25] And so many of the issues that I discussed are, you know, they're never talked about; they're background that are never talked about. I mean, Muslims are almost a quarter of the world's population.

John Reed: [01:12:35] Mm-hmm.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:12:36] Islam is the second most populist religion in the world. And you know, not only do people in the West misunderstand it, but honestly Muslims misunderstand it.

[01:12:46] You know, these developing countries that are starting to put archaic punishments on their books are doing it wrongly. Like all Islamic scholars agree that where these ancient punishments are implemented, they're implemented wrongly. And yet why are countries doing it? To give themselves legitimacy, to show that they're Islamic and therefore legitimate.

[01:13:08] And also frankly, it's a way to control populations and keeps them in fear and keeps them from rising up. But it gives Islamic law a very bad name, to have the Saudis behaving the way they're behaving, or the Iranians, or whoever it is, or the Taliban, for example, who honestly are criminal ignorant thugs who know nothing about Shariah.

[01:13:28] So it's such a mass of complications, but it's such a huge part of our world that I think it's just really important to understand because Muslims are Americans. You know, Muslims are Americans and Canadians and English and German and whatever there is, and by fomenting fear of Muslims, we're dividing our country, right?

[01:13:47] We're fomenting fear and hatred. We're undermining our constitution with these anti-Shariah laws. We're giving rise to bad public policy decisions and bad foreign policy decisions if we have an irrational fear of Shariah and Muslims. So, it's important for all of us to understand, to some extent Muslims and Islam so that we can evaluate what our leaders are doing.

[01:14:13] The Obama administration at any given time was bombing seven Muslim majority countries. If Muslims are the bad guys, then that's okay with us, right? But what if we're not the bad guys? So, it affects all of us, and I write my books. Okay. Fair disclosure. I had over 800 end notes in my last book, but they're academically reliable, but they are easy to read.

[01:14:35] I wrote them for the lay reader. You know, they're not textbooks, they're not written only for lawyers. Although I think lawyers will appreciate them because a lot of it is about law. So that's why I am, that's what my goals are.

John Reed: [01:14:46] Well, I appreciate it. I thank you first and foremost for your patience with me.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:14:51] No, you were great.

John Reed: [01:14:52] As I learned and for being such a delightful guest. Your passion for this topic is evident, and I only wish more people could learn from you and overcome the ignorance.

[01:15:03] We'll put all the information up on our website regarding your books and your writings. They'll be in the show notes, as well as on our website.

[01:15:11] And I just want you to know I appreciate you and I'm grateful for this conversation.

Sumbul Ali-Kalamari: [01:15:15] Well, it's been so much fun talking to you, and it's been an honor, and I thank you for having me.

John Reed: [01:15:21] Hey, listener, are you still there? Is this your first time tuning in? If so, would you please subscribe?

[01:15:27] And if you're a longtime Sticky Lawyers fan, I'm glad you're back. But could you also leave us a comment as well? Do a guy a solid, and just tell us how you feel about the podcast, that you can't live without it, and, you know, the way that every episode has changed your life. You can do that wherever you get your podcasts. Apple, Google, Spotify, or by visiting stickylawyers.com.

[01:15:51] I would consider it a personal favor, and I would be forever grateful. Until next time, I'm John Reed and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.