But as everyone should know by now, liberties begin to erode when you have laws that are too widely drawn. And laws which say that under no circumstances can a court take any account of the Shariah are necessarily discriminatory. They’re necessarily over broad. And they necessarily create communal dissention for no good purpose.

— Sadakat Kadri on the movement to ban Shariah law in America.

One thing I realized when traveling around the Muslim world is how closely these hard-line interpretations of Islamic law are associated with political consternation and turmoil. There isn’t a country anywhere in the Muslim world which has been applying Muslim laws continuously for hundreds of years and which is drawing on genuine tradition. It’s a revival of supposed traditions which don’t really pay much heed to history at all.

— Sadakat Kadri on interpretations of the Shariah over the last 40 years.

The argument just tends to get so confused these days between people who attack the Shariah when actually what they ought to be attacking is the hard-line interpretations of Islamic law. By attacking the Shariah, basically a huge amount of mistrust and incomprehension is created between Muslims and non-Muslims. Because as far as a Muslim is concerned, an attack on the Shariah is an attack on God.

— On today’s Fresh Air, English barrister and historian Sadakat Kadri describes 1400 years of Islamic law and how it’s changed over the centuries.