Would you be for or against implementing Sharia Law there? and why or why not?
Thank you for the very relevant question here.
To answer you,I'll have to go through my background first. I live in a Muslim country named Tunisia. 7 years a go there was a revolution in tunisia and the president had to flee the country. People found it a great opportunity to express themselves and speak freely how they think tunisia should be after the revolution.(so we had this conversation going for months)
Some of these people were asking for "sharia", including thse practices you just mentioned, but they eere a minority and they were silensed by reason.
You know what was the answer?
The aaswer was:" we're all muslims(well most of us are) in tunisia, we want to apply the sharia, but you don't get to define what sharia is!"
The official religion in tunisia is islam. We claim to have lows that don't contradict the sharia, well at least what we undertand from it.
I invite you to check the tunisia laws and see if they are any different from western countries laws.
Because we think sharia in about some limits not to cross but you can do whatever you want within.
Now to answer your question, I like germany the way it is, and i like Tunisia the way it is. They both have have decent laws.
Can I tell you a secret now?
I think western countries are applying sharia even better then some muslim countries that apply such practices.
It's all about how you analyse the Coran! Because the Coran shouldn't be applied literally!
There are books trying to explain one sentence from the coran and books trying to proove that the firs ones are explaining that one sentence wrong, and I can give you examples for that!
So if scholars that spent many years studying the coran, and none of them claims that he understands it, please dont try to analyse the translation of a small portion of the Coran that you can find on the internet.
Thank you for your response.
About the Tunisian law system. I did finish law school and let me tell you it takes time and effort to go through a single law, let alone a whole system of laws. I did read about your constitution a bit on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Tunisia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Constitution_of_2014). Now, I usually take Wikipedia's word with a pinch of salt, mainly because I don't feel that if it's written in wikipedia that makes it automatically true, or even more precise which details are true and which aren't. For the sake of the argument let's say everything is true there.
I am happy for the tunisian people that they decided to have a secular law instead of a religious law. My opinion on religious law is that it usually doesn't allow for real defense and doesn't accommodate well if at all for changes in society and technology (mainly because religious law is believed to come from God), while secular law, in a democracy, is the expression of the will of the people (and it acknowledges the fact that the will of the people change in time) while still preventing from the tyranny of the majority.
I do expect that there are strong interests for Tunisia to become a fundamentalist country, and there is and will be pressure in order to shift the Overton window in that direction. One of the clues for that are the terrorist attacks that happened in Tunisia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_Tunisia). I hope the people of Tunisia will hold their ground in favour of individual freedom than to succumb to religious sophistry.
Like I said in my previous posts, my fight is not with the people, but with the ideology.
I know very well that religion shapes culture, and the more oppressive the religion the more it influences the culture. Religion can also be tyrannical in its practices and teachings (I am reffering to any religion that allows for the "scholars" to gain power over people by using peoples' beliefs against them). But I also consider religion to be one of if not the most powerful tool for creating social cohesion in a nation. And in order to have peace among the population you need social cohesion.
Now, I do think Tunisia is in a geographical location and with a history that allows for secular law to be preferred by its people. Not many muslim countries benefit of the same advantage.
I didn't understand exactly what it means to have an official religion in your country. And I mean to which extent is the official religion a part of the administration of your country. My country, Romania, has the official religion of orthodox Christian, and what that means is mostly a cultural acknowledgement of the importance of our religion in shaping our culture, but it also gives the church some benefits like reduced/no taxes for its services, allowing for the patriarch to give speeches at the parliament at certain historical events.
I do think that your country needed to adjust its laws in such a fashion that would accommodate to some degree the religious sensibilities of those that are more on the fundamentalist side while still allowing to some extent the desire of liberty of those that are mostly cultural muslims. And that I deduce by how you worded this :"we're all muslims(well most of us are) in tunisia, we want to apply the sharia, but you don't get to define what sharia is!". This leads me to think that 1. your people either didn't address Sharia Law head on, letting it be ambiguous in the hopes that in time people would come closer to a secularized version of it. or 2. your people tried to enforce what many if not most of the scholars would see as a watered down version of Sharia. I think the first assumption is more plausibile because that would lower the risk of continuous uprisings.
About your statement that the Coran shouldn't be applied literally... I agree with that, but I also think that many muslims would see you as a bad muslim for this. I agree that any religious text claiming to have the word of God in it (either verbatim or metaphorically) should be analized beyond the words in which it comes presented as, that means you should read between the lines and try to understand the principle behind them.
But at the end of the day, I do think that the Coran's teachings are inherently bent on conquest and on codifying what I consider some attrocious behaviors against those that are not muslim, and against muslims themselves in many cases. And that in many cases you would need to go through many mental hoops in order to interpret some passages as being peaceful. Don't get me wrong, Judaism and Christianity has/had this problem as well, with violent passages. The difference though consists in the fact that neither christians nor jews consider that the holy books contain the actual words spoken by God, but these are the stories of the witnesses of the people that were touched by God. Moreover, even the stories are not taken verbatim as being necessarily factually true, but mostly as archetypal stories.
About analyzing the Coran, my mode of analysis consists on the text and on the events that are happening in the real world. And when I see (some) muslims taking the literal text as a way of living in the most violent ways, I don't really care if other scholars have interpreted the teachings in a peaceful way. To be honest, I wouldn't even care that much if there wouldn't be this whole mass migration trend from muslim countries to western world (with the encouragement of the EU). I always thought that the best way would be for each and every nation to find its spiritual evolution. But, since we live in the current world, and having to face the current reality, I do think people should have open discussion about religions, even though this would lead to hurting religious sensibilities.
With that said, thank you for your honest replies, and for not applying taqiyya.
:) we almost agree on many things except:
1-Tunisia is not the exception, the opposite cases are. But we still agree there are different cases, regardless of their percentage ;)
2-we shouldn't blame Islam for what some specifc muslims did in the name of islam(like what happened in Romania) and I should thank the other specific muslims for spreading Islam the right way. The examples are endless but I couldnt find them in english, I remember an easy one though: No muslim army ever entered china, but islam did, through muslim merchants.
We should keep in touch so I can tell you when I have a better answer(sorry it's just not the right time for me to do a deep research these days :/)