On the Incompatibility of Islam with Western Civilization

Who defines the norm that a society must obey: its citizens, or a law deemed divine and therefore beyond their will?

In liberal democracies, law proceeds from the deliberation of citizens and remains subject to revision. In the classical Islamic tradition, part of the law, sharia, is held to be of divine origin. This tension is not incidental: it structures the entirety of Islamic legal thought, from the status of the apostate to the condition of women, from blasphemy to jihad.

Drawing on the Quran, the hadiths, and the major works of jurisprudence, Antoine Pomerleau methodically examines these normative foundations and confronts them with the demands of political modernity: freedom of conscience, equality of rights, and the primacy of civil law over religious law.

In this essay, you will discover:

• The classical Islamic conception of law and sovereignty, and why it refuses, in principle, the primacy of civil law;
• The legal treatment of apostasy and blasphemy across the major schools of jurisprudence;
• The doctrine of jihad and the status of non-Muslims in Islamic lands;
• The condition of women under classical Islamic law;
• Why attempts at reform run up against the very foundations of the dogma;
• What Quebec's experience of secularism, from the Quiet Revolution to Bill 21, reveals about this confrontation.

Quebec as a field of observation. As a society that itself had to wrest its institutions from religious tutelage, Quebec offers a unique vantage point: what becomes of secularism and state neutrality when they encounter a legal tradition that, absent doctrinal reform, has never recognized their legitimacy?

An essay for those who refuse truncated debates. This book is addressed to readers of political philosophy, to defenders of secularism and freedom of expression, and to all those who wish to understand, with textual evidence in hand, the stakes of integration and Islamism in our societies.

This book does not judge the faith of believers. It subjects a doctrine to the scrutiny that any free society is entitled to demand, and it refuses to conflate respect for persons with immunity for ideas.

Antoine Pomerleau is an essayist and independent researcher in political philosophy.