The Polemical Use of Islamic Law in the Education System of the United States Military and Federal Law Enforcement

In his examination of the compatibility of the Islamic legal tradition and its Western counterpart, William Gawthrop arrived at some startling and unsettling conclusions. Due to certain injunctions in the 14th century legal manual The Reliance of the Traveller, Gawthrop noted that there was ample evidence that Muslims could lie to protect each other, their faith, and themselves from non-Muslims. In the current “War on Terror,” these conclusions have serious ramifications for legal proceedings and information gathering by Western law enforcement and intelligence organizations. It is the critical misunderstanding of these sources that led to the rise of practices similar to the ones recently unearthed by Spencer Ackerman and other investigative journalists, and which prompted both the Departments of Defense and Justice to reevaluate their Middle East and Islamic studies training programs for military officers and Special Agents in the FBI. However, given the approach of the Bush White House in the early moments after 9/11, and the analytical direction the U.S. government took, mutually exclusive paradigms (i.e., Islam vs. the West) became the dominant view of affairs. In so doing, government analysts from (but not limited to) the FBI, DOJ, and DOD who usedfiqh(Islamic jurisprudence) displayed a general lack of understanding in the very nature of Islamic law, deducing that Islamic and Western legal traditions were uniform, and that methodology and approach were in reality the same as a conclusion, discovering behavioral maxims where no such injunctions existed.