Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Should Not Be President
“Sharia law is for Muslims. So if there is a Muslim majority state then it has to be run by Sharia,” stated basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with surprisingly little public controversy in a September 23 interview. This statement and other elements from Jabbar’s biography only accentuated reservations concerning a Muslim president recently raised by Ben Carson, even as Jabbar in another interview dismissed Carson as “bigoted and irrational.”
Although Jabbar qualified that in America “I live in a very diverse country and I have to respect everyone else’s beliefs—the Koran says that,” his views on sharia remain troubling in light of Muslim-majority societies worldwide. Surveying such societies, many Americans would agree with the founding father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who replaced sharia with European laws in his country in the 1920s. “Islam—this theology of an immoral Arab—is a dead thing,” he stated, that “might have suited tribes in the desert. It is no good for a modern, progressive state.”
Jabbar, who stated that “Islam is my moral foundation,” dismissed people like Carson as being “not substantiated by anything in Islamic teachings.” Writing about his conversion to Islam from a Catholic background, Jabbar criticized that many around the world do not recognize the supposedly “peaceful practices of most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.” “Violence committed in the name of religion is never about religion,” he wrote in response to the January 7 Paris massacres of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and others. Such terrorists simply want “more recruits and more donations to keep their organization alive…It’s just business.” A January 14 CNN interviewer accordingly noted Jabbar’s objection to the phrase “Islamic terrorism” and his concern with “being careful with our language” and “our respect for other religions.”
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