In 2012, the word “creeping sharia” became a familiar phrase to Americans vigilant against the spread of radical Islam. It arose when the Kansas Senate voted 33 to 3 in favor of a bill that prevented courts and government agencies from basing decisions on sharia law. It was a powerful and decisive step toward challenging Islamism.

Since then, sharia has found yet another way to cultivate a climate for its re-emergence.

Sharia, the Islamic legal system that is a hybrid between the Quran and the teachings of Islamic scholars in a post-Muhammad era, marries theology with law. It’s a central pillar in Islam, the most politically geared of all faiths. In Islam, law and order (the “mind” of a civilization) comes before spirit and conscience (the “heart” of a civilization). A successful civilization can blend and balance the duality.  Islam never could.  That failure is why we’re seeing a clash of civilizations.

A Crisis of Conscience in the Muslim World Today

Despite what Muslims say about the faith’s consistency, Islam had strains of humanitarian consciousness brought into it by Sufi thinkers – the mystical branch of Islam that grew from Christian and Jewish mysticism, Zoroastrianism, and Hindu Vedas among other early teachings. The heart of a civilization also grew through Islam’s “Golden Age,” marked by a scholarly climate that welcomed the rich exchange of ideas with Greek and even Jewish philosophy.

These are exceptional moments that mark Islam’s shift toward a secular narrative, but they don’t define a faith that wasn’t developed with those principles in mind. Islam was organized to grow in numbers and rule spatially.  It wasn’t, like Christianity, designed to continue the legacy and teachings of Christ’s emphasis on higher spiritual values.

This is partly the reason why we don’t see a rich exchange of ideas today in the Muslim world in a space that tolerates and protects dissenters. The void created as a result has thrown the Muslim world into a descent that is complicated by high immigration and globalization, and now a burdening refugee crisis. Whether abroad or at home, Muslims are marked by a crisis of conscience – the crisis is that a conscience doesn’t exist.  Our growth is stunted by other factors too, including a combination of petrodollars, the mass accumulation of wealth through industry, political power plays, conspiracy theories, limited access to education, and a culture that frowns upon curiosity, exploration and play. Most significantly, it’s a growth stunted by the cracks in Islamic law itself.  Sharia’s legal jurisprudence sets the blueprint for an Islamic culture that perseveres in Muslim homes regardless of whether or not that family is highly religious.

How Sharia Law Undermines the Integrity Women and Girls

Just about any Muslim will tell you that Islamic law takes a pro-feminist stance; it grants women freedoms that didn’t exist in pre-Islamic Arabia and quite frankly didn’t even exist in the West up until the last century. All this true. Yet Islamic law, like its predecessors in Biblical and Jewish law – is in many ways outdated in a modern society that has grown in conscience to envelope a greater spirit that honors universal human rights.

This is something most Muslims cannot accept. The way the Islamic faith is structured, with rigid adherence to the Quran and the life of Muhammad, create a Muslim psyche that (unless it has been challenged early on or is an outlier) cannot accept an identity or environment that detours from the Islamic blueprint.

The West has undergone a moral revolution in the last generation, one that has seen it embrace all new standards of equality for women as well as racial and sexual minorities.  While praiseworthy, this has weakened any capacity to distinguish between things that are properly unequal.

The Islamist mind is preying on this aspect of the West’s ongoing moral revolution.  Because Western moral theories are still developing their ways of thinking about equality, the West is prone to confusing the right of individual reality with seeing all ideas as equal realities.  By this I mean that people have a right to make up their own minds and decide what kind of a world they believe that they live in, for example by adopting a religion.  But not all of these views are equally good, and especially the consequences of these several ideas are not all equally good.

This is what makes the West susceptible to political correctness.  This mistake has created an environment ripe for the re-emergence of an Islamist pro-Sharia agenda.

All ideas are not equal, especially when we consider how granting equality to everything snuffs the rights of the most vulnerable demographic in Muslim society: its women and children. Rumy Hasan, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex, recently wrote a brilliant piece in HuffPo UK on the ruthless social environment sharia law creates, debilitating women and children and crippling the rights of freethinkers and outliers in the community – the very people you need to empower if you want to see a change within Muslim communities.

But there’s more and something almost all conversations around sharia seem to ignore: the role of social shaming in Muslim society.

Social currency is a high value in Muslim societies, and it’s used daily to navigate all matters of life and did so even in the early days of Islam before Islamic law was cemented.  Tamim Ansary, in Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, has this to say on the first wave of scholars in Islam who set Sharia into motion:

“[They] defined the law, controlled the courts, rand the educational system, and permeated Muslim social institutions. They had tremendous social power throughout the civilized world, the power to muster and direct the approval and disapproval of the community against particular people or behaviors. I emphasize social power, because in Muslim society, which is so community oriented, social pressure – the power of shaming – might be the most powerful of all forces, as opposed to political power, power which operates through procedural rules, control of money, monopoly control of the instruments of force, and so on.”

Social power is used today in two ways. First, it’s used by Islamists to exert control of the conversation in a PC-conscious environment that cannot tell when that conversation is being manipulated. And second, it’s used by too many Muslim families and communities to strong-arm and control the behavior of women in that society.

So while the pro-Sharia sentiment is to grant the communities the right to their own legal system, what they don’t consider is the multitude of women who will be either physical, emotionally or financially coerced into waiving Western law and complying with a Sharia law. This move strips of her rights and her dignity as a wife, a mother, and an independent body outside the control of the larger family. It primes her to be a victim.

The other side of the story is this: if you don’t force Muslim communities to integrate with Western society fully through all legal channels, you ensure that Muslim culture remains unchanged.

Sharia law, which we all know sees the worth of a women as one-fourth of a man, reinforces a disfiguring culture that sees girls as less than boys; and this is how Muslim children are raised even in a Western society: girls are seen as less than boys. Those who were raised differently are outliers again, but too many girls – including myself – weren’t part of families that were exceptions to the rule.

Promoting a sharia-friendly environment means that you’re leaving a community unchallenged and its women and children unprotected. It means that thousands of other girls will be raised in households where parents aren’t guided into a new way of thinking. The girls will grow up with American identities but won’t possess the American ideals of individualism and freedom of pursuit that are cornerstones of a free world.

How much more could they be if they weren’t limited, raised in homes where the default advantage went to boys over girls – because the worth of a boy is higher than the worth of a girl? And how much more could I have been if I knew of my own worth sooner without having to struggle to find it and fight for it in a society that didn’t even know I was suffocating?

As Western society continues to evolve in heart, there’s a greater step that needs to be taken now that we’ve recognized universal human rights. The next step is recognizing the right of individual reality. Each man, woman and child has the right to exist fully and freely without the force, coercion and impression of another’s reality upon him or her. This is the highest good and the highest state of any civilization, and it’s a path that has no room for sharia.  Not sharia, nor any other ideology that undermines this aspect of human dignity and individual reality.