A local school board meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, morphed into a raucous discussion of free speech and Islam Wednesday, as more than 100 people signed up to comment, primarily on the reported posts of a board member who questioned the religious nature of Islam. One week earlier on Nov. 3, the Florida chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, demanded that school board member’s resignation over an apparent Facebook share declaring, “We got lost in the myth that Islam is a religion.”
The screenshot was attributed to Duval County School Board member Tony Ricardo. Action News Jax said it could not independently verify that he shared it. CAIR’s demand was categorical: “We call on the school board member who shared it to resign.” But this post deserves a more serious answer than a resignation campaign.
I am an ex-Muslim who lived 19 years under sharia, the legal and political order Islam presents as God’s law. Islamic sources describe an order reaching from prayer to government, courts, and punishment. That order is a theocracy: rule by divine law with God as sovereign.
CAIR wants a public official removed while offering Americans a definition of sharia that leaves its governing authority out of view. In CAIR’s October 2025 congressional memorandum, CAIR calls sharia a “personal moral and spiritual framework” and “a voluntary moral compass, not an alternative legal code.”
CAIR also assured Congress that sharia commands Muslims to obey the laws where they live. Its own factsheet attaches the condition: Muslims obey “so long as those laws do not require them to engage in indisputably evil conduct.” Sharia defines what counts as evil, so American law receives a conditional loyalty, granted on sharia’s terms.
Islam names itself “Deen al-Islam,” a phrase usually translated as “the religion of Islam.” The Quran, Islam’s scripture, uses the language of “deen” in its own voice. In 3:19, it declares, “Indeed, the deen in the sight of Allah is Islam.” And in 5:3 it says, “Today I have perfected your deen for you … and chosen Islam as your deen.”
For Americans, “religion” evokes belief, worship, and a congregation someone freely joins or leaves. But the Islamic concept translated as “religion” actually names a total order of divine government and sovereignty. English readers hear “religion,” while the Arabic claims “government.” That system is a theocracy, with God as sovereign and sharia as His law.
The Quran makes that meaning concrete in the chapter on the prophet Joseph. In 12:76, Mustafa Khattab’s English translation renders the king’s deen as “the King’s law.” The verse uses deen for the legal system that governed the kingdom. The 11th-century jurist al-Mawardi, in his treatise on Islamic government, describes the imamate, the office of the Muslim ruler, as succeeding prophethood in guarding the deen and administering worldly affairs. The ruler’s office joins religious guardianship to government.
The 20th-century Muslim thinker Abul A’la Maududi is equally direct. In “Four Basic Quranic Terms,” he describes deen as the “entire way of life,” encompassing sovereignty, submission, a “system of thought and action,” and judgment. Even “state,” he explains, only approximates the term’s breadth. Maududi spells out the duty this theocracy creates. In a state governed according to divine law, “it is the religious duty of every Muslim to obey the state and all its commands.” Political obedience becomes part of religious obedience.
This is a matter of long-held doctrine and mainstream practice. Al-Mawardi and Maududi both place worldly rule inside the obligations of deen. CAIR’s “voluntary moral compass” omits precisely the power these accounts assign to Islamic authority: the power to govern.
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