Oh no Sharia!

So there's a lot of hate for Muslims out there and it's rising here at the end of 2025. One of the main avenues of attack is how terrible Sharia Law is, and I took these attacks very seriously when they flared up 24 years ago near the end of 2001. So much so that, unsatisfied with the social media takes on Sharia, I researched and read about its history and its mechanics.

I read The Sources of Islamic Law by John Burton and Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought by Daniel W. Brown to learn about the different competing philosophies of Islamic Law held by early Muslims.

I read a paper The Introduction of hadith in Al-Andalus By Isabel Fierro which examined how the use of Hadith as a source of Islamic law spread to Andalusia.

I read Islam: The Straight Path by John Esposito and No God but God by Reza Aslan for general Islamic History.

I read Sexual Ethics and Islam by Kecia Ali to dive deep into a lot of controversial topics especially focused on the status of women in the faith.

And you can read these or similar works to learn about all of this yourself. And maybe read the Quran for yourself too?

Or you could read my novel where I incorporate a lot of what I learned into the story of a young woman who lives in a fictional Sharia following matriarchy and writes fatwas to defend it from zealots who want to undermine it. A lot of the plot revolves around different understandings of Sharia. It's called "Under The Full and Crescent Moon" and it was published recently. Alhamdullilah.

If you don't want to do any of that then the one fact I hope you takeaway is that Sharia is just... laws. And different Muslim communities throughout history have had diverse approaches on not only what the laws should be, but how to come up with them in the first place.

To justify hate against a demographic of people you have first to flatten them into a hateful stereotype. As a Muslim, I'm used to this. But I don't want to be anymore and I don't want my children to grow up used to it. So I'm not going to stop pushing back as much as I can, in any way that I can.

All opinion my own, in the end only God knows best.