Why We Must Map Sharia And Islam In Britain

The Middle East Forum has just made available for download a much-anticipated, landmark study published in the latest issue of Middle East Quarterly, entitled "Sharia And Violence In American Mosques".

Authored by legal expert David Yerushalmi and Mordechai Kedar of Israel's Bar Ilan University, the 14-page paper is the culmination of the Mapping Sharia Project, whose initial findings were first revealed in 2008.

The study's methodology was rigorous, objective and thoroughly scientific, and involved in-depth undercover investigation and mapping of 100 American mosques across 14 states, randomly sampled but representative of the overall Muslim community.

Among the study's findings include:

- "Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all." This amounts to a total of 81% of American mosques which, to some degree, advocate political violence against non-Muslims in service of sharia governance.

- "In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at shariah-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-shariah-adherent mosques." Additionally: "[O]f the 51 mosques that contained severe materials, 100 percent were led by imams who recommended that worshipers study texts that promote violence."

- Mosques that were identified using empirical, well-defined criteria as being strictly "shariah-adherent" were "more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-shariah adherent counterparts.”

These important data have a number of key implications. First of all, they completely validate Rep. Peter King's much-maligned claim that around 80% of American mosques have been taken over by extremists, almost to the exact percentage, as well as the previous testimony of Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Muslim himself, who provided an identical estimate of the jihadist infiltration of American mosques in front of the US State Department in 1999.

Another important observation of the study is that rigourous adherence to sharia is shown to be strongly correlated to the likelihood of violent texts being sold, recommended and preached at any given mosque, along with the promotion of establishing a sharia-based caliphate in the United States. This underscores the importance of forbidding sharia any foothold in any part of the Western world, no matter how innocuous and harmless it appears to be, since bringing sharia into non-Muslim societies inevitably brings jihad also, and those who most vigourously advocate the implementation of some sharia laws into the Western legal system are the most likely to advocate total Islamic political takeover of Western countries by way of full-fledged sharia - in other words, sedition.

Here in the UK, the Home Office recently announced that it is planning to move on to a broader definition of "Islamic extremism" that, rather than simply focusing on violent terrorism, will include non-violent "advocacy of sharia law". Now, then, is the ideal time to undertake a large-scale investigation of British mosques similar to this latest one from America. We've already seen some evidence of radicalism in British mosques, and an investigation by The Times has also revealed almost half this country's mosques are under the control of the hardline Deobandis, who preach jihad and hatred of British values. But a rigourous study of the kind we have seen from this new report is needed in order to dispel any lingering doubts that when it comes to the Problem of Islam, the UK and the US are indeed close bedfellows.