Elena Kagan's Active Promotion of Shariah Law

The Center for Security Policy’s web ad raising questions about Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination targets her dedication to Shariah law:

“As Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan banned military recruiters from campus because US law said they couldn’t enlist homosexuals. Well, she invited the Saudi’s ‘recruiters’ to promote their legal code–Shariah– which calls for homosexuals to be murdered and women to be treated like animals.”

If Kagan had genuinely objected to the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies, she would not have sponsored a November 2008 lecture promoting the Malaysian Shariah and secular (Section 377) anti-gay laws of “Do Ask, Do Tell, Do Flog and Do Imprison for 20 Years.”

In fact, Kagan actively promoted Shariah law throughout her Harvard years. Under Kagan, Harvard’s Islamic Legal Studies Program developed a mission statement (here on 9/2008, also 6/2009) dedicated “to promote a deep appreciation of Islamic law as one of the world’s major legal systems.” In 2003, the year Kagan became Harvard Law School Dean, Islamic Legal Studies Program Founding Director Frank Vogel and Associate Director Peri Bearman founded the Massachusetts-based International Society for Islamic Legal Studies. Under her leadership, Bearman and Vogel in 2007 founded the Islamic Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (inaugural panel audio here). Fueling that expansion was a $20 million donation from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal discussed by Frank Gaffney here, Newt Gingrich here and NRO’s Andy McCarthy here .

See a pattern? It gets worse.

Kagan didn’t just passively receive funds from Shariah’s financiers. On November 11, 2008, to kick off a 3-day conference she presided over on integrating Shariah law and national constitutions, she sponsored a lecture by a Malaysian jurist on Shariah and secular laws, focused on laws against homosexuality: “Harmonization of Common Law and Shari’ah in Malaysia: A Practical Approach.”

This lecture – the fourth Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri Lecture on Legal Interpretation in the Middle East, a series she had started – was delivered by the former Chief Justice of Malaysia Tun Abdul Hamid Mohamad.

With Kagan’s approval, this lecture series was named for a 20th century Islamic jurist – Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri – who worked to impose Shariah laws on civil codes, and who helped create the Arab League.

Let’s repeat that: Kagan named this prestigious lecture series after an Egyptian jurist who worked to impose Shariah law on civil codes, not to impose modern or civil liberties concepts on Shariah codes.

Be clear which team he was playing on. He was not playing on the team supporting our Constitutional principles. He was playing on the team dedicated to their destruction – Shariah.

Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri was a socialist, an educator and an attorney. He helped draft the “civil” codes of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq – the so-called “Sanhuri” Codes – making sure they were Shariah compliant. Scholar Enid Hull has written about al-Sanhuri:

“The Law with which his name is inextricably linked is the revised Egyptian Civil Code of 1948. A major aim of this revision was to make Egypt’s civil law more Islamic …. The Civil Code as a highly developed artifact of modern legal engineering should not obfuscate the fact that it also incorporates al-Sanhuri’s lifelong concern with reinvigorating Egypt’s Islamic legal heritage, the Shari’a. His revision of the code was intended to produce a civil law as Islamic as the legal and social conditions existing at that time in the country permitted.”

There’s more. Al-Sanhuri was also a signer of the original 1945 Cairo Pact of the League of Arab States (p. 3, bottom half of the page): H.E. Abd Al Razzak Ahmad Al Sanhury Bey (“Bey” is an honorific). This Arab League founded what would become the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 at their Cairo summit. The PLO was considered a terrorist group by the US until 1991.

In his lecture, the former Malaysian Chief Justice spoke on the increasing integration in Malaysia between federal, local and Shariah laws, featuring as a primary example a conflict of laws case on sodomy, according to the June 2009 Newsletter of the Islamic Legal Studies Program (p. 6 & 7). In his lecture, Chief Justice Mohamad stated that he agreed with the Court of Appeals in the sodomy case, who had decreed that “the Shari’ah court must have exclusive jurisdiction over the matter.”

The Chief Justice did mention one other case – the enforcement of Shariah blasphemy laws – in his lecture on Shariah’s precedence over civil law:

“He suggests that the Shari’ah court first decide on the Shari’ah aspect of a case and the common law court follow in determining the legal consequences under the common law of the facts as interpreted by the Shari’ah court. He has himself followed his suggestion in a case in which the accused were held to have defied or disobeyed a fatwa that was published in the Government Gazette of the State of Terengganu (December 4, 1997). He let the Shari’ah court decide whether the acts of the accused constituted contempt for the precepts of Islam.”

In this lecture, Elena Kagan’s Islamic Legal Studies Program promoted Shariah law’s supremacy over civil legal codes. She promoted Shariah elsewhere as well.

On November 19, 2008, just a week after the Chief Justice’s lecture, as reported in Big Peace, Kagan gave the prestigious Harvard Medal of Freedom to Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, helping to return him to power in 2009. In early 2010, as noted in this Wall Street journal oped, Chaudhry began to transform Pakistan’s Supreme Court into a Shariah Court by imposing the infamous “Article 62” across the government. Article 62 declares that members of parliament are disqualified from serving if they violate “Islamic injunctions” or if they do not practice “teachings and practices, obligatory duties prescribed by Islam.”

These are only a few examples demonstrating Elena Kagan’s history as one of Shariah law’s most active American promoters.

In the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders pledged to each other “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” Kagan has given far too much of her life, her fortune – and her sacred honor – to promoting Shariah law in this country and abroad.

Is this who Americans want on our Supreme Court?