MAYBE WE'RE JUST EMBARRASSED THAT THEY TAKE IMMORALITY MORE SERIOUSLY THAN WE DO:

The Grand Mufti's mission (Michael Gerson, October 23, 2009, Washington Post)

Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, possesses a wonderfully exotic title, a scholarly manner and the unique burden of issuing about 5,000 fatwas a week -- the judicial rulings that help guide the lives of the Muslim faithful. On a recent visit to the United States, he explained to me the process of "resolving issues of modern life." And modern life offers Gomaa and his team of subordinate muftis plenty of fodder for resolution, from the permissibility of organ transplants, to sports gambling, to smoking during Ramadan, to female judges, to the use of weapons of mass destruction, to mobile phone transmitters on the tops of minarets. [...]

Reform in the Arab world is not likely -- at least soon -- to reflect the Western privatization of theological beliefs. All of life is subject to sharia law, and most Arab governments gain at least a part of their legitimacy by reflecting it. At its worst -- but rarely -- this involves the classical Islamic punishments of stoning and amputation. At its best, sharia law plays an equivalent role to the rule of law, binding both rulers and ruled by the same objective standard of justice.

Really? Is amputation so clearly worse than a mandatory prison sentence? Or is the Puritanism that results in those sentences a matter of American life at its worst? It's easy to see why the amoral Left should hate sharia. But how does the Right square its moral conservatism with a hatred of Arab moral conservatism?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 24, 2009 3:53 PM