Muslim U.S. Senate candidate grilled again for comparing canon law with sharia law

A Michigan U.S. Senate candidate’s remarks have prompted examination of the substantial differences between Catholic and Islamic jurisprudence.

ANN ARBOR, Michigan — In the closing days of a hotly contested U.S. Senate race, Michigan Democratic candidate Abdulrahman “Abdul” El-Sayed released an ad on “Prayer” in which he says that as a Muslim he prays every day.

Commenting on the ad, Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of the advocacy organization CatholicVote, said: “I take him at his word that he is a man of prayer and he, as an American Muslim, deserves the same religious liberty we Catholics have fought to protect for two centuries.”

“What I question is something else,” Reinhardt continued. “El-Sayed has repeatedly answered fair questions with false equivalences, and he has put Catholics and our Church at the center of them.”

Reinhardt was referring to El-Sayed’s repeated equation of Catholic canon law with sharia. Addressing concerns about his Islamic faith and fears over the imposition of sharia, in a video shared on social media El-Sayed emphasized that if elected to the Senate, “I’m going to swear an oath to that U.S. Constitution.”

In the video, El-Sayed told a town hall questioner in Michigan, who identified himself as a Christian, that “because of the U.S. Constitution you have the right to live according to canon law and also because of the U.S. Constitution you don’t get to enforce canon law on anyone else.”

Reinhardt squarely accuses El-Sayed of drawing a “false equivalence” between the two systems. “The Code of Canon Law is the internal legal order of the Catholic Church. It governs how the Church administers sacraments, organizes dioceses, and disciplines its own clergy. It makes no claim over the criminal code of any nation,” she explained.

”Classical sharia is a different kind of thing. Many American Muslims understand it as a matter of personal devotion, and that is their right,” she continued. “In its historic jurisprudence, though, sharia is a comprehensive legal order. It reaches into family law, criminal punishment, and the governance of the state. That is why it is written into the constitutions of several nations, and canon law is written into none,” Reinhardt pointed out.

“One can respect both traditions and still see that they are not the same. A Senate candidate should know the difference,” she said.

The issue first came to the forefront during an Aug. 24 interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters, when El-Sayed asked, “Do you know what canon law is, Jesse? … canon law is the name for Christian law … Nobody is trying to push sharia law on anyone else. Just like I hope nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion.”

Following that exchange, Catholic Answers’ Todd Aglialoro also pointed out the problematic comparison and why the issue is a relevant one.

“Sharia is a broad term for codes of Muslim conduct,” Aglialoro explained. “In many countries that are predominantly Muslim, Sharia is deeply embedded into civil and criminal law, with its prescriptions, judgments, and punishments serving a governing function.”

In the West, Aglialoro continued, sharia has become a flashpoint of controversy in places “where Muslim-dense locales experience conflict between local law enforcement, based on liberal Western values, and neighborhood Muslim councils dispensing gray-market Sharia judgments that often contradict those values.”

“The majority of these hot spots are in Europe, but as Islam grows in certain regions of the United States, there has been talk of measures to prevent that kind of ‘parallel justice’ from taking root here,” he noted.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, who serves on the Vatican Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue with Muslims and is a professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, told EWTN News that for Muslims, “God’s will for humanity is sharia.”

Sharia includes explicit implications for non-Muslims. For example, Islamic law allows for a head tax known as “jizya” on Jews and Christians. At different times Christians in the Islamic world have suffered from abduction, enslavement, subjugation, and forced conversion.

In contrast, the Code of Canon Law is neither “Christian law” nor a civil code for all Christians, but orders the life of the Catholic Church. Unlike sharia, as Aglialoro points out, “Catholic canon law is not about superimposing a full spectrum of doctrinal and moral teaching onto the everyday life of religious adherents. It is more like a thick binder of organizational bylaws.”

Professor David Long, who teaches canon law at The Catholic University of America, told EWTN News that comparing canon law and sharia may help illustrate believers’ “freedom to observe religious obligations” but “does not establish that canon law and sharia share the same sources of authority or jurisdiction.”

Long said of El-Sayed’s comparison: “As an appeal to the religious freedom protected by the Constitution, the analogy makes a useful point: Catholics and Muslims alike may seek freedom to observe their religious obligations without thereby claiming authority to impose those obligations on their fellow citizens. That constitutional argument does not depend on the two legal traditions being equivalent.”

“Islamic jurisprudence also provides rules for civil government, including those affecting non-Muslims. The distinction is substantial, but it must be stated without reducing canon law to administrative rules or treating every Muslim’s religious observance as a proposal for state enforcement,” Long added.

For Christians, Long contends, the central issue concerning sharia is the distinction between religious freedom and coercive state authority.

At the time of publication, El-Sayed’s campaign staff had not responded to an EWTN News request for the candidate to clarify his position on the matter.