Should We Be Encouraging the Rise of Sharia Law?

I usually avoid commenting on a book I have not yet finished, but I'm going to make an exception. If you look at my Current Reading sidebar, you'll see a book by Noah Feldman called The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. I have only read the Introduction to Feldman's book, but it already shows some potential to be a fascinating read. I had read a review in Commentary, which was not altogether flattering, but Commentary's reviewers have their own point of view. So I was looking forward to spending some time learning about Feldman's thesis.

Today I was reading another book on my Current Reading list, Marching Toward Hell, by Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst, and a very provocative writer. In the middle of a chapter called "And the Islamists' Fire Quietly Spreads," Scheuer has this comment:

"Today the evolution of such cooption [of Muslim clerics and scholars by authoritarian Arab governments] has created an environment in which Muslim citizens or subjects perceive the senior levels of the religious establishment as an arm of the government, not as independent clerics fulfilling their role of ensuring that the regimes govern according to Islamic law - preventing vice and promoting virtue, as it were."

The key here, in terms of the intersection of Scheuer's work and Feldman's thesis, is that there is (or historically has been) a legitimate role for religious scholars ('ulama) in limiting the actions of government. The breaking down of this role opens the way, Scheuer contends, for Islamist influence.

This is interesting in at least two ways. First, according to everything I've read on the history of the Middle East, the 'ulama had been displaced from their as an effective legal and political body years ago. The Middle Eastern states adopted written constitutions, created legislatures and secular judicial systems, and confined sharia law to matters of personal status (what we might call "family law.") Certainly the scholars at Al Azhar had some influence in Egypt and the Middle East, and the Saudi regime was based on the support of Wahhabi clerics. Feldman starts from the position that the Islamic state went largely out of business when Ataturk reformed Turkey into a modern Western nation-state. So I find it notable that Scheuer is arguing that the clerics were still an influential body in Arab societies until 1990.

This could be another example of our failure to see through the public relations efforts of the Middle Eastern states, to see that the reality has been much more traditional and Islamic than one might have guessed from Arabic-language television programs.

The second interesting point is that both Scheuer and Feldman, coming from very different places, seem to be advancing the thesis that the traditional Islamic clerics could function as a firewall against Islamic extremism, if they were able once again to function as an effective check on executive power in Muslim countries.

I can tell that I'm going to come back to this topic in the coming days. I encourage all my readers to read these books, and to bring your comments and criticisms to the table. Is the United States barking up the wrong tree in opposing the restoration of traditional Islamic law in Muslim countries?