Sharia: Iraq's Dark Cloud

There's nothing particularly surprising about such rationalizing on the right. Vice President Dick Cheney responded predictably to January's Iraqi election, which expanded the power of Shiite religious parties, with the declaration that "we have a great deal of confidence in where they're headed." What else is an architect of the war going to say?

On the Christian right, such reactions are even more understandable; these are the very people who routinely denigrate America's own constitutional separation of church and state. Why should they worry if the new Iraqi government prevents a woman from divorcing without her husband's consent and gives her legal testimony only half the weight of a man's? As long as the Iraqis steer clear of a Saudi-style ban on all other forms of worship (read Christianity), a religion-based Iraqi constitution poses no logical obstacle for U.S. fundamentalists.

But the neocon hawks and religious right are far from alone in their sanguine view of Islam as the basis for a friendly government. Some on the left, succumbing to a patronizing multiculturalism -- freedom of conscience for me but not for thee -- are also spouting rationalizations for looking the other way if Islamic law, or Sharia, is imposed on the people of Iraq.

Many members of the new Islamic studies establishment in U.S. universities see objections to a union between government and Islam as one more example of American provincialism. "The mere mention of Islam in a constitutional context should not cause an overreaction," asserts Frank E. Vogel, director of Harvard University's Islamic legal studies program.

"This could be a legitimate cause for alarm, or it could be purely symbolic," adds Vogel, whose official academic title is "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies." (The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, as it happens, is one of the official titles of the king of Saudi Arabia.)

But if history teaches us anything, it is that government enforcement of religious law has always been the natural enemy of individual and minority rights. One person's religious symbolism may be another person's real pain.