Muslim candidate for US Senate compares Catholic canon law with sharia

Commenting on the announcement, Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of the advocacy organization CatholicVote, said, “I take him at his word that he is a man of prayer and that, as an American Muslim, he deserves the same religious freedom that we Catholics have fought to protect for two centuries.”

“What I question is something else,” Reinhardt continued. “El-Sayed has repeatedly answered fair questions with false equivalences, and has placed Catholics and our Church at the center of them.”

Reinhardt was referring to El-Sayed’s repeated equation between Catholic canon law and sharia. Addressing concerns about his Islamic faith and fears about the imposition of sharia, in a video shared on social media, El-Sayed emphasized that if elected to the Senate, “I will pledge a commitment to the US Constitution.”

In the video, El-Sayed told a questioner at a public meeting in Michigan, who identified himself as Christian, that “because of the U.S. Constitution you have the right to live by canon law and also because of the U.S. Constitution you cannot impose canon law on anyone else.”

Reinhardt directly accuses El-Sayed of drawing a “false equivalence” between the two systems. “The Code of Canon Law is the internal legal order of the Catholic Church. It governs how the Church administers the sacraments, organizes dioceses, and disciplines its own clergy. It makes no claims over any nation’s criminal code,” she explained.

“Classical sharia is a different kind of thing. Many American Muslims understand it as a matter of personal piety, and that is their right,” he continued. “In its historical jurisprudence, however, sharia is a comprehensive legal order. It reaches into family law, criminal punishment and state governance. That is why it is written into the constitutions of several nations, and canon law is not written into any,” Reinhardt pointed out.

“You can respect both traditions and still see that they are not the same thing. A Senate candidate should know the difference,” she said.

The issue first came to light during an August 24 interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters when El-Sayed asked, “Do you know what canon law is, Jesse? … Canon law is the name for Christian law … Nobody is trying to impose Sharia law on anyone. Just as I hope no one is trying to impose canon law on anyone, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion.”

Following this exchange, Todd Aglialoro of Catholic Answers also pointed out the problematic comparison and why the question is relevant.

“Sharia is a broad term for Muslim codes of conduct,” Aglialoro explained. “In many predominantly Muslim countries, sharia is deeply embedded in civil and criminal law, with its prescriptions, judgments and punishments serving a governmental function.”

In the West, Aglialoro continued, sharia has become a point of controversy in places “where localities with high Muslim density experience conflict between local law enforcement, based on Western liberal values, and Muslim neighborhood councils that dispense gray-market sharia judgments that often contradict those values.”

“Most of these hot spots are in Europe, but as Islam grows in certain regions of the United States, there have been discussions about measures to prevent this type of ‘parallel justice’ from taking root here,” he noted.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, who serves on the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue with Muslims and is a professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, told EWTN News that for Muslims, “God’s will for humanity is sharia.”

Sharia includes explicit implications for non-Muslims. For example, Islamic law allows for a per capita tax known as “jizya” on Jews and Christians. At different times, Christians in the Islamic world have suffered from kidnapping, slavery, subjugation, and forced conversion.

In contrast, the Code of Canon Law is neither “Christian law” nor a civil code for all Christians, but orders the life of the Catholic Church. Unlike sharia, as Aglialoro points out, “Catholic canon law is not about superimposing a full spectrum of doctrinal and moral teachings onto the everyday lives of religious adherents. It is more like a thick paste of organizational statutes.”

Professor David Long, who teaches canon law at Catholic University of America, told EWTN News that comparing canon law and sharia can help illustrate the “freedom of believers to observe religious obligations” but “does not establish that canon law and sharia share the same sources of authority or jurisdiction.”

Long said of El-Sayed’s comparison: “As an appeal to religious freedom protected by the Constitution, the analogy makes a useful point: Catholics and Muslims can equally seek freedom to observe their religious obligations without thereby claiming authority to impose those obligations on their fellow citizens. This constitutional argument does not depend on the two legal traditions being equivalent.”

“Islamic jurisprudence also provides rules for civil government, including those affecting non-Muslims. The distinction is substantial, but it must be stated without reducing canon law to administrative rules or treating every Muslim’s religious observance as a proposition for state imposition,” Long added.

For Christians, Long maintains, the central issue regarding sharia is the distinction between religious freedom and coercive state authority. At the time of publication, El-Sayed’s campaign team had not responded to a request from EWTN News for the candidate to clarify his position on the issue.