Civil Legal Cases Involving Sharia Law, In At Least Eleven States

From Creeping Sharia:

Civil legal cases involving sharia law, in at least 11 U.S. states


Posted on November 30, 2010 by creeping

…and this is just a representative sample. As we noted here, Intro to Islamic Family Law in US Courts, even Muslims have acknowledged that U.S. judges are “creating a body of case law” that involves Islamic sharia law. From the Public Policy Alliance:



Legal Cases Involving Shariah



A recent (11-08-2010) representative sample of 17 civil legal cases from 11 states where plaintiffs or defendants attempted to use Shariah law is provided here. The states for these sample civil cases are Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.



Shariah_Civil Legal Cases_Representative_11 States



…



Shariah is frequently encountered in family law cases across the USA today; in Shariah-compliant accommodations that may result in discrimination against non-Muslims; and in Shariah-Compliant Finance on Wall Street and in the U.S. government.



There’s more, and a long list of accommodations to Islamic sharia law in the U.S. at the PDF link above. For those interested in uncovering more cases, here are some tips from the Public Policy Alliance on how you can find them:

Anyone can easily research legal cases which may involve Shariah law in your own state, using search terms such as Shariah, Sharia, “Islamic Law,” or the names of countries where the Shariah is applied for family, civil, contractual and/or criminal cases. Let’s walk through a sample search from a different state than those above – Virginia:



1. First, go to Google Advanced Scholar Search: http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search



2. Enter the search term “Islamic law” in the search field for “the exact phrase”



3. If you scroll down, you’ll see that you can search for “legal opinions and journals” for all legal opinions, just U.S. Federal opinions, or court opinions from one or several of the 50 states.



Select “Search only court opinions from the following states”



4. Then select the box for Virginia, home of many of the authors of the Constitution



5. Click “Search Scholar”



6. You’ll see this page: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=&num=10&as_epq=Islamic+law&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_sdt=4&as_sdts=47&btnG=Search+Scholar&hl=en



And you’ll see two legal cases:



7. The first case is Ahmed FARAH v. Naima Mansur FARAH, Record No. 0184-92-4, Court of Appeals of Virginia, May 11, 1993. In this case, the lower court had accepted Shariah law (Islamic law) as valid law in Virginia. The appeals court held that “trial judge erred by declaring the Farahs’ marriage to be valid in Virginia based on the trial judge’s finding that the marriage was valid under Islamic or Pakistani law.”



8. The second case, ALI AFGHAHI,v. NEDA GHAFOORIAN, Record No. 1481-09-4, Court of Appeals of Virginia, Alexandria, March 30, 2010, was also a divorce case. The court of appeals affirmed the lower court decision for the husband to pay the wife 514 gold coins; he had claimed his wife was not an expert on Islamic or Shariah law, and the appeals court stated that she was not required for the purposes of testifying on the marriage contract to be an expert in Shariah.



8. Caveat: Google scholar is not a professional search tool, like Westlaw, so additional cases may be found using more thorough methods.



Another way to see how sharia law is creeping into your state is to use the “Select Category” drop-down just below the Geert Wilders sketch, above right