Misleading meme: North Carolina did not ban the practice of Islamic law

The post shows an image of the North Carolina map with the caption, “North Carolina has banned Islamic sharia law and regard it as criminal, as it should be…Lets make it nation-wide.” It has been shared more than 50,000 times since April 2019.

Image

Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post taken January 23, 2020

This claim is misleading. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which applies to North Carolina, ensures the free exercise of religion, including Islam.

However, North Carolina passed a law in 2013 that prevents state judges from using foreign law, which may include sharia law, to decide cases. 

The law, intended to “protect its citizens from the application of foreign law that would result in the violation of a fundamental constitutional right,” does not ban individual religious practice.

In a 2018 article for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US non-profit organization which fights for civil rights, senior research analyst Swathi Shanmugasundaram called the legislation “totally useless,” since the US Constitution already denies authority to foreign law.

Two years before the passage of the law, the American Bar Association formally denounced measures that place blanket bans on the application of foreign laws in American courts. 

Although the legislation may stand up legally, “such initiatives that target an entire religion or stigmatize an entire religious community, such as those explicitly aimed at ‘Sharia law,’ are inconsistent with some of the core principles and ideals of American jurisprudence,” the ABA statement reads.

Sharia law is practiced in the courts of numerous Muslim-majority countries, but it is not a monolithic system.

As of 2019, twelve other US states have passed this type of law, and 43 states have either proposed or passed bills of this kind, according to an Islamophobia report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization for Muslims in the US.