To the ears of those who have been brought up with Western values, it may sound natural to separate Islam from Sharia. But the two are inseparable.
Islam is a complete system of belief, worship, law, morality, family life and public order.
The word “Islam” means submission or surrender to the will of Allah. Sharia is the practical embodiment of that surrender, Mohamad Faridi explains.
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What is Sharia?
By Mohamad Faridi, as published by Iranian Christians International on 12 May 2026
Western leaders repeatedly draw a reassuring line: “We uphold freedom of religion, therefore Muslims and Islam are welcome. But Sharia is incompatible with our values and has no place in the West.” President Trump combined warm Ramadan greetings with a firm policy against immigrants who believe Sharia should replace American law. Governor Abbott has defended Muslims’ right to mosques and worship while declaring, “Sharia law is not allowed in Texas.”
To Western ears, it may sound natural to separate Islam from Sharia. Many people assume Islam is simply a private religion, while Sharia is a separate legal system that only some Muslims choose to follow. But that distinction is wrong. Islam means surrender, but surrender to what? To the will of Allah. How is that surrender done? Sharia is the prescribed way of living that surrender out. The confusion comes from viewing Islam through a Western lens, where religion is often treated as a private matter. Islam, however, is a complete system of belief, worship, law, morality, family life, and public order. When policymakers fail to understand that relationship, they can make serious mistakes with consequences.
The Western View of Religion vs. Islamic Reality
In the modern West, shaped by centuries of Christianity, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, “religion” is often understood as a personal, private matter of conscience. It concerns one’s relationship with God, moral values and voluntary community practices. Most who are born Christians in the West today treat their faith as a matter of individual belief. One can identify as Christian while living a largely secular life. Church and state are distinct. Faith is protected but does not dictate every detail of civil law. Religious liberty means the right to believe, worship and even change one’s faith without state coercion.
Islam operates on an entirely different paradigm. The word “Islam” itself means submission or surrender to the will of Allah. A Muslim is “one who has surrendered.” The will of Allah is not primarily a matter of inner spirituality or personal interpretation. It is explicitly and comprehensively revealed in the Quran – regarded as the literal, verbatim words of Allah – and in the Sunnah, the example of Muhammad preserved in Hadith literature.
Sharia simply is the practical embodiment of that surrender. It literally means “the way” or “the path to life,” derived from four main sources:
- The Quran
- The Sunnah/Hadith (especially Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)
- Consensus of scholars (ijma)
- Analogical reasoning (qiyas)
Sharia is not limited to prayer, fasting, and charity (the Five Pillars, which are themselves part of Sharia). It is a total system regulating family law, diet, dress code, inheritance, criminal justice (hudud punishments), finance, governance, warfare, and social relations with non-Muslims. In orthodox Islamic theology, there is no separation between “religion” and “law,” or between “private belief” and “public order”. To be Muslim is to accept Islam and its Sharia as the guide for life.
This is why praising Islam while condemning Sharia is incoherent and self-contradictory. It is like welcoming Christianity while rejecting the teachings of Christ and the apostles.
Many politicians and citizens project their own secularised, individualised understanding of faith onto Muslims and are shocked when reality does not conform.
This conceptual mismatch leads to several dangerous mistakes:
1. Misguided Immigration and Integration Policies
Western governments often assume that Muslim immigrants will treat Islam the same way most Europeans or Americans treat Christianity – as a private Sunday (or Friday) affair that can be compartmentalised. When Muslim immigrants instead seek to establish parallel societies, Sharia councils or enclaves where Islamic norms prevail, officials are surprised. Sharia commands separation; the doctrine of (Al-Wala’ wal-Bara’ – loyalty to Muslims and enmity or hate toward non-Muslims) is not an “extremist” aberration but a mainstream teaching of the Islamic law rooted in the Quran and Hadith.
2. Failure to Defend Constitutional Supremacy
Liberal democracies assume all religious practices must yield to core civil rights: equality under law, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and equal protection for women and minorities. When Sharia norms clash – on apostasy, honour killing, blasphemy, women’s rights or inheritance – officials often hesitate, citing “religious freedom.” Yet Sharia is a competing legal and political system. Granting it space through accommodations (such as Sharia courts in the UK, blasphemy laws, religious arbitration or no-go areas) effectively imports a rival sovereignty.
3. The Moderate Illusion
Policymakers and many comfort themselves with the existence of peaceful Muslims. These individuals exist, but they are often “Muslim” in a cultural or nominal sense – much like many nominal Christians who ignore core doctrines. True orthodoxy demands adherence to Sharia. Turkish President Erdogan rightly observed that the very concept of “moderate Islam” is a Western invention. Projecting Western fluidity onto a legalistic faith leads to underestimating long-term demographic and cultural disaster.
4. Security and Social Cohesion Blind Spots
Doctrines of jihad, mandated enmity toward non-Muslims, and supremacism are not peripheral. They flow naturally from the comprehensive nature of Sharia. When Western authorities treat Islam as “just another religion,” they downplay patterns of radicalisation in mosques, parallel legal systems, honour killings, grooming gangs and polling data showing substantial support for Sharia in Muslim communities. The result is repeated policy failures across Europe and growing tensions in the United States.
5. Erosion of Western Christian Heritage
Christian civilisation produced the very freedoms the West enjoys: the dignity of a person (imago Dei), equality before God and law, freedom of conscience and limited government. By treating Islam as a private faith equivalent to Christianity, the West risks undermining the cultural soil that made its liberties possible. In some sense, Christianity separates sin from crime, like drinking at home can be morally wrong without being legally punishable. But in Sharia, religious violations are also legal violations and are punishable.
Key Incompatibilities with the Constitution
Loyalty and Enmity: Quranic verses 60:4 and 3:28 form the scriptural basis for the Islamic doctrine of Love and Hate (Al-Wala’ wal-Bara’). They prescribe a framework of spiritual tribalism and supremacy, dissociation from non-Muslims and perpetual enmity until conversion, while permitting pragmatic concealment of such attitudes when Muslims are weak.
Inequality: Dhimmi status for Christians and Jews; legal disadvantages for women.
Apostasy and Blasphemy: Severe punishments that negate freedom of conscience and religion.
Jihad: Expansion and subjugation framed as religious duty.
Totalism: No realm of life outside Allah’s law as interpreted by Sharia.
These are not some medieval relics. They remain embedded in mainstream Islamic sources and continue to shape behaviour where Sharia influence is strong.
Conclusion
The West must stop projecting its privatised, post-Christian understanding of religion onto Islam. Sharia is not an optional “radical” accessory – it is the operating system of orthodox Islam. Recognising this does require clarity: Western Judeo-Christian law must remain supreme. Religious liberty cannot extend to practices that undermine the constitutional order, equality or public safety.
True tolerance is not self-destruction. It is the confident defence of a civilisation built on Christian-shaped values of dignity, justice and ordered liberty. Until policymakers grasp the comprehensive nature of Islam and Sharia, immigration, integration and security policies will continue to produce predictable failures.
The distinction between “Islam” and “Sharia” is a comforting fiction. Reality demands better.
About the Author
Mohamad Faridi is the President of Iranian Christians International, stylised as Iranian Christians Intl. He was born and raised in a devout Muslim family in Iran. After years of faithfully following the Muslim faith, his goal ultimately became to be a martyr in Jihad. This all changed after a divine encounter with Jesus Christ in Iran. He made Jesus his Lord and Savior and started sharing the Gospel with fellow Iranians. As a result, he faced persecution and had to flee the country for his life. In 2012, he took refuge in America.
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Mohammed a Camel-Trucking Pedophile Warlord forcing demonic cult onto villages and whole societies at the point of a sword. MOHAMMED IS NOBODY TO EMULATE.
Jesus Christ is a sinless, perfect God in a man’s body having Divine Nature and also Human Nature…That is the man to emulate. Christians MUST NOT tolerate the presence of the Cult of Islam in the west.
The problem arises in knowing the Luciferians delusional as their own Gods and Pagan Demon Worshipers crave the fall of Christianity as it is the only real religion having the Son of God with full power to utterly wipe them out from Earth and send their demonized souls to hell from where the demons originate.
Hell’s force’s have only one goal and that is the THEFT of all God’s creation for itself even though it knows it’s to lose.
Demons work at taking as many human souls to Hell as possible in the meantime.
DEPORT THE MUSLIMS BACK TO THEIR COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN. THAT IS THE ONLY ANSWER.
Spot on and Amen!
This is a battle for which form of law dominates. Currently we are since the Norman conquest under Roman civil law, and common law in name sake only The Jews understandably have got their knickers bunched up with the Romans who pretend to be Christians and they are not to keen on christs for spoiling their lives by pissing off the Romans so they are using the Muslims to take down the Romans and introduce their noahide laws Only our ancestral common law has as it main principle equality before the law and the other three main contenders must destroy this idea in order to succeed
it’s not just the Muslims that are a problem they are just the instrument our elected leaders are in some ways worse
I reject Judeo-Christian laws. I accept only Christian laws based on the Ten Commandments. Jewish Noahide laws – in the Talmud have no place in a Christian society the same as Sharia law.
Not sure if it’s OK to send links in these chats – YouTube doesn’t like it – but I thought you may be interested to listen to this American pastor exploring whether or not there is such a thing as a Judeo-Christian tradition. He’s not a ranter but a quiet introvert at his desk with relevant books to hand. I think you’re onto it already but …… – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRuzbXrfdCw&t=1553s
Thank you. I appreciate your kind gesture in a world gone mad.
*The Koran teaches that Moslems must differentiate between non-Moslems who mean them harm and the ones who don’t. Also, modern Moslem eschatologists are teaching Moslems that they must unite with Christians, although they specify Eastern Orthodox Christians.
*The failure of Western liberal democracies probably has it’s roots in the separation of Church and State where the “leaders” are no longer answerable to a higher spiritual authority, and the clergy couldn’t explain themselves sufficiently for the leadership to see that they had something above the norm: the Church had become politicised. Compare this to Russia where the leadership are all devout EO Christians and submit themselves to that higher authority.
*Most Moslems are peaceful Moslems in their own countries – but look what the West has done to many of those peaceful Moslem countries – Palestine, the Western implemented and backed Iraq-Iran war, the two illegal US invasions of Iraq, Syria, Libya, the US-backed genocides in Gaza and Lebanon, and the openly-stated plan for the crushing of all those countries, plus Korea, Russia and China as delineated on the website Project For A New American Century (since taken down). What reason do peaceful Moslems have to stay peaceful? The Koran teaches that Moslems can do to their enemies what their enemies have done to them, but they are forbidden from attacking an enemy first. This is Sharia Law. The West has also entrained the extremist Moslems – Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Moslem Brotherhood – and use those violent proxies for their own purposes in the area. Pointing the finger at Moslems and absolving oneself from complicity only works with the uninformed.
*The Koran is a blueprint for a stable society based in spiritual law. If one studies Islam long enough, one finds that all the aberrant things about Islam, the honour killings, forced marriages, etc, were cultural elements in the groups who converted to Islam before they converted and are ongoing problems that the pure orthodox Moslem Imams are working to ameliorate. When it comes to the Imams radicalising their parishioners, well, just look at what the West has done to multiple Moslem countries! Westerners have to take responsibility for these crimes and work towards restitution. This has to come from ordinary people educating themselves and building bridges themselves: “The West” will never do it – they are too busy supporting the war on Iran and pushing for open war with Russia (with stated hostilities towards China) and precipitating WWIII to have anything left over for restitution to Moslems.
*Christian civilisation has been consistently undermined over the centuries by a certain other very powerful “religious minority”. In the words of one of its prominent writers who described the deliberate undermining of Christianity, “Who knows what heights of glory you Christians could’ve attained if [we] had left you alone?”. And, if we don’t project our Western ways of doing things onto Moslems, we will see that punishing drinking alcohol is not the arbitrary thing it would be in our society but is punishment because the drinker is violating God’s creation – i.e., himself – by doing it, and violating another aspect of God’s creation, i.e., his family and community, at the same time. And, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the erosion of Christian heritage is largely attributable to Christians. We have to be humble enough to ask the question, “What is my contribution to these difficulties?” and pick up responsibility for it and stop playing the victim.
Just wanting to put this here for the community of people who make comments here, as well as to help Rhoda who makes all these efforts for us. These are George Orwell’s rules for writing English. I put them here because I notice that some commentators don’t know these rules, and I regularly see the most inflammatory and judgemental things being posted – trolling, as I think it’s called. So, here they are –
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous
………. the last one being the pertinent one.