The Recent National and International Past as Prelude

In treating “The Recent National and International Past as Prelude,” this chapter begins with a personal anecdote from a local newspaper headline which provides a segway into coverage of “Anti-Sharia Protests and Anti-Sharia Legislation in the United States (and other Western Lands), before and after 9/11.” I trace the origins of these various intersecting protests and movements back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and follow them through American (and broader Western) reactions to the rise of the Afghan Taliban in 1996, the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent “War on Terror,” and the rise of ISIS, along with scathing critiques of the implementation of Islamic-Sharia Law in Saudi Arabia. This is followed by treatment of “Debates over the Relation of Mosaic Law to U.S. and State Constitutional Law, 1990–Present” which plays out in various U.S. state courthouses and other public spaces in Florida, Texas, Kentucky, and more. The chapter draws attention to the fact that, although these two strands of late twentieth-, early twenty-first-century American religious-legal debate are distinct, there has been general failure to recognize their deep and strong ties, in both past and present, which leads to a need for “Digging Deeper in the American, Judeo-Christian and Western-Islamic Past” in relation to “Resurgent Anti-Semitism in the post-9/11 Period,” “The Post-10/7 World: Surging anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish Hate amid the Israeli-Hamas War,” “Post-Secularist Religious Revival & the Return of Political Theology,” and “Debates over Religious-National History and Identity in Comparative Perspective.”