Sharia Is Islam: Why the West Keeps Getting This Wrong

Sharia is not a personal or optional add-on to Islam but is Islam itself—a complete, compulsory divine system of law, governance, and social order that every believing Muslim is religiously obligated to strive to implement wherever they live, making any permanent acceptance of secular law a doctrinal impossibility.

By Vlad Tepes

Most Westerners instinctively treat “Islam” and “Sharia” as two different things. They assume a devout Muslim can be like a devout Jew or Christian: personally religious, privately observant, but perfectly able to live under secular law without trying to replace it.

After all, a religious Jew can follow Halacha at home and still accept American, Canadian or British civil law. A religious Christian can follow Canon law in church and still accept the Criminal Code. So why, they wonder, can’t Muslims do the same with Sharia?

That assumption is a category error. It is the false dichotomy that lies at the heart of Western confusion about Islam.

In a modern times lecture titled Sharia: Barbaric or Perfect?, Dr. Haitham al-Haddad – one of the most senior Islamic jurists in the English-speaking world – explained the orthodox Islamic position with unusual clarity and honesty.

He did not present a personal opinion. He presented the classical position that is fully consistent with the Quran, the Sunnah, the major tafsirs (commentaries), and the scholarly consensus (ijma) across the centuries. Also Islamic sermons today across the west, and Islamic history.

At this point we should really look at his credentials. We wouldn’t want to take the word of some random Imam who got his credentials from the back of a comic book.

Shaykh Dr. Haitham al-Haddad

• PhD in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) of Muslim minorities from SOAS, University of London (thesis submitted around 2010, focusing on applying classical Islamic law in contemporary Western contexts like Britain).

• Bachelor’s degree in Sharī‘ah and Law from the University of Omdurman, Sudan.

• Additional studies in engineering (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia) and classical Islamic sciences.

• Trained in Saudi Arabia, including studies under prominent scholars (e.g., associated with students of major figures like Ibn Baz).

• Holds many traditional ijāzāt (authorizations/licenses) in Qur’an, Hadith, and other Islamic sciences.

• Current major role: Chair of the Fatwa Committee for The Islamic Council of Europe.

• Long-time judge/advisor for the Islamic Sharia Council (UK & Eire) — over 15–20+ years of experience handling real-world cases.

• Specializes in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), usul al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence), and applying Sharia to modern/minority contexts.

• Frequent speaker, TV presenter, author, and contributor to conferences across the Muslim world. He runs or contributes to various educational initiatives in the UK.

Clearly an authoritative voice on Islam and one who is more than permitted to represent the faith, but respected as one who explains what Islam actually is to fellow Muslims.

We should listen to him.

His opening statement could not have been more direct:

“Sharia simply, simply is Islam. Sharia is Islam. Islam is Sharia. Both are the same thing… Once we talk about Sharia, we are talking about Islam. Once we are talking about Islam, we are talking about Sharia. They are the same thing.”

This is not a metaphor. It is not “cultural” or “extreme.” It is the doctrinal baseline. In Islam, Sharia is not a personal moral code you can keep in your private life while accepting secular governance. Sharia is the complete system of law, governance, ethics, and social order that Allah has commanded for humanity. To accept Islam is to accept the obligation to work for the supremacy of that system.

This is why Islam functions, much as does communism, as an entirely different system of thinking – not merely another parallax view of the same reality.

Therefore, attempting to understand Islam as a threat, or even its miscibility to Western Civilization through the lens of Western concepts is suicidal.

The clip below is an excellent illustration of this. In what we may call “Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman thought, concepts of the afterlife are treated somewhat separately from a given individual’s sense of personal or national identity and even of their own religiosity. Most afterlife concepts are often thought of as metaphors, or not believed at all.

In Islam, the core doctrine, the central thinking is about how to think about this life, versus the “life after death” on a measured scale.

This is not debatable in Islam. It is central to Islam and an aspect of the sharia. If you do not believe in the afterlife as defined by Islam, and in the last day, you are an infidel. If you were at one time a Muslim and have come to not believe this now, you are an apostate and legally can be executed for this kufr, or lack of belief.

Within the Islamic framework, he is explaining that the outcome (afterlife) is presented as certain: reject or delay Sharia and you risk the Fire.

The same pattern appears when he highlights Western double standards on violence; a legitimate point about inconsistency, but one that does not change the doctrinal reality that Islamic expansion historically occurred through conquest or deception, not because populations freely chose it as a superior way of life for themselves.

In other words, whatever the truthfulness of his critique of Western culture, it does not negate the demonstrable fact that Islam is worse on every metric from the point of view of individual rights.

His claims:

• This life is a test whose real consequences play out in the eternal life after death.

• Sharia is the only system that properly balances both lives.

• Therefore, every believing Muslim is under a religious obligation to strive for its implementation wherever he or she lives. Neutrality or permanent acceptance of secular law is not an option; it is disobedience.

• Disobedience has severe consequences.

Communism, another fundamentally different set of core views on reality itself, does not see itself as one political option among many; it sees itself as the scientific, inevitable replacement of the old order.

Likewise, Islam does not see itself as one religion among many; it sees itself as the final, complete, and compulsory order for all mankind. You cannot accurately predict or understand the long-term actions and intentions of committed Muslims (or committed communists) unless you first grasp the epistemology, the core set of fundamental beliefs of the system itself.

Dr. al-Haddad repeatedly returns to this point throughout the lecture. Sharia is not “just for Muslims in Muslim countries.” It is the law of the Creator, legislated by the only truly neutral and perfectly qualified Legislator. Any man-made system (democracy included) is, by definition, biased toward the interests of whoever holds power at the moment. Only Sharia, because it comes from Allah, is free of that defect.

He is equally blunt about the implications for believers.

The following clip is a clear example of this kind of Islamic sophistry. He makes fallacious comparisons with some legitimate flaws of some forms of democracy, with Islam, claiming that Islam’s sharia is created by Allah, the creator of all things, and is therefore superior to man-made law.

It is sophistry because while there is truth behind his criticism of systems of voting and their implications in ‘democracies’, his alternative has zero evidence to support the claim that Islamic law is divine and perfect. It is a purely invented claim of perfection to contrast with a real but flawed system. Again, very much a Communist dialectical tactic as well. Often socialists compare flawed outcomes in non-Communist systems with utopian ones that communists intimate should be the norm.

But this sophistry, while a logical fail, is not without serious consequence.

This is not optional personal piety. It is compulsory.

That is why al-Haddad can say, without hesitation, that no believing Muslim can ultimately be content with a permanent secular order.

Westerners keep misreading Islam because they keep projecting their own religious and cultural experience onto it. Judaism and Christianity, as practiced for centuries in the West, made peace with the idea that religious law can coexist with (or even yield to) secular governance. Islam never did, and cannot, according to its core doctrine.

Sharia is not an accessory to Islam. It is Islam.

That is the uncomfortable but necessary truth, Dr. Haitham al-Haddad stated plainly. Until Western audiences understand that Islam operates on a fundamentally different epistemic plane and not as another flavor of “religion” but as a complete, compulsory system that rejects the legitimacy of secular law, as well as any other religious framework, in the long run, they will continue to misdiagnose both the challenge and the required response.

Any space allowed for Islam in a non-Islamic space means leaving space for sharia.

The lecture is worth watching in full precisely because it removes the ambiguity. For once, a senior Islamic authority was not softening the message for Western ears. He simply explained the system as it actually exists in orthodox Islamic thought. And that system leaves no room for the comfortable Western assumption that “Islam” and “Sharia” can be neatly separated.

The full lecture is below:

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