Can A Muslim Be President? Why Dr. Ben Carson Was Right

Dr. Ben Carson got caught off guard when he stated in an interview that he couldn't possibly envisage a Muslim exercising the office of the president of the U.S. Yet, in principle, his answer was right on. The outcry in American-Muslim and progressive quarters demonstrates once again the want for proper erudition on significant subject matters of political and cultural affairs in this country. 

Islam's limited appeal to open and democratic societies stem from the absence of a dogma separating religion from State. What is still missing in the Muslim creed is something similar to the two-swords or two-kingdoms doctrine that Christendom has articulated, reaching back to St. Augustine and his De Civitate Dei. 

When Augustine distinguished the Civitas Dei, the City of God, and the Civitas Terrena, the City of Men, or the Earthly City, he laid the foundation for the separation of Church and State.  By separating the heavenly and spiritual realm from the temporal earthly domain, Augustine paved the way for developing the dualist Christian doctrine that sees the Church control the spiritual kingdom, whereas, in contrast, the State is in charge of worldly affairs. While the spiritual realm stands hierarchically higher and allows the Church to influence politics and societal matters, the doctrine excludes the City of God's enforcement upon the City of Men. In other words, a Christian theocracy would collide with the dogmatic principles of the religion itself.  The wisdom of this corresponds with Jesus' sayings, "My kingdom is not of this world" (as stated in John 18:36) and "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21). On the basic tenet that the Kingdom of God awaits the Christian believer in a different world, one of divine and spiritual nature, it is proper and suitable to establish and submit to earthly authorities in Man's worldly existence. In the vein of this accepted wisdom of western thinking, the concept of the nation-state evolved and spread across the globe, with its original idea of a separation of powers and monopolization of force by secular political entities.
 
Unlike Christianity, Islam does not separate religion from politics. Attempts to reconcile Islamic tenets with secular governance are barely visible. Sharia law is prevalent, which means, strictly speaking, that divine law imposes upon earthly conditions. Jurisprudence in Islam is merely the expansion and application of Sharia onto worldly circumstances. In other words, in its most serious interpretation, Islam is a religion that aims to manifest God's kingdom in the realm of men. The objective is to establish the Ummah, the community of the true believers, of all Muslim people, sharing the same ideology, culture, and beliefs, dictated and held together by (divine) Sharia law. 

Islam must provide a straightforward solution to the separation of Church and State, religion and politics, a division between the ecclesiastical and civil sphere, and the divine and secular realms. Until accomplished, any representative of this religion will unavoidably be in collision with either his/her Muslim belief system or the political environment of a Christian-based society in which he/she wants to live. 

This circumstance does not impair or curtail religious freedom that Christian societies usually grant other faiths by allowing them the free exercise of their religion. As shown, the restriction to hold individual political offices emerges from the dogma of Islam's religion itself. 

However, particularly concerning the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the discussed aspect highlights the general problem of equal treatment of all religions in a political system based on Christianity's intellectual, cultural, and social heritage.  The question is how this heritage, as it reflects itself in the customs, laws, and cultural configurations of this very society, be upheld if religions whose traditions and spiritual principles are in many respects irreconcilable with the Christian host environment are considered equal? 

The question directed at Dr. Ben Carson could ensue consequences and entail a public debate that might lead far beyond the aspect of whether or not a Muslim could become president of the United States of America. It brings to the fore a weakness in the First Amendment that the founders didn't foresee when they adopted this amendment on December 15, 1791. 

We have to assume that in those early years of the new republic, the legislators could not have possibly anticipated that the Christian roots of this new nation would ever be discredited or put in doubt. And neither that somebody could seriously raise a question of the kind directed at Dr. Carson. 

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it!

Shakespeare's aphorism from Hamlet comes to mind when one looks into the state of affairs in global relations. With every day, the evidence becomes overwhelming that what I considered to be the political blunder of a U.S. administration run by a presidential dilettante of hitherto unknown proportions is part of a grand, albeit pathological, globalist strategic design.

The plan appears to aim at a New World Order under the exclusive leadership of the United States. Going back to the Project for the New American Century (P.N.A.C.), a neoconservative think-tank of the late 1990ies, this foreign policy approach has guided U.S. foreign policy in principle ever since. Despite its roots in the Republican party, the Imperialist idea of establishing a Pax Americana, a New World Order enforced and controlled by the U.S., was willfully extended by the governing regime of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama. While slamming the Bush-Cheney administration for the Iraq War and attempting to take military control over the Gulf region, he aggressively continued shaping foreign affairs policies and implementing an international security order according to American interests. Since Obama took office, we could witness the instigation of the Arab Spring by the support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against President Mubarak, the backing of insurgents in Libya and Syria, and the turning of both nations into failed states. Furthermore, the Obama administration enabled the formation of ISIS and caused the death of tens of thousands of people and the displacement and flight of hundreds of thousands. Those policies drove the world into chaos, thus far unparalleled in our lifetime.
 
However, American imperialism, hiding behind alleged democratic principles and presumed policy necessities, landed one of its probably most sanctimonious achievements in Ukraine by orchestrating a coup d'état against the democratically-elected, albeit allegedly corrupt, government of then-president Yanukovich. By establishing the Washington and Berlin-backed Poroshenko administration in Kyiv, the U.S. and the E.U. drove Ukraine into a fratricidal civil war and severely damaged Ukraine's and Russia's economy. In the usual reversal of cause-effect realities, the mainstream media and the U.S. State Department blamed Russia's aggression and Mr. Putin's expansionism. Since then, the military build-up on the Russian and NATO side has drastically increased, laying the seed for what quite a few commentators consider to be the initial charge for World War III.

From a western and transatlantic alliance perspective, though, a most disturbing development has to be seen in the unleashing of a wave of mass migration from the Middle East's conflict regions toward Central Europe, particularly toward the more developed and geographically conveniently located nations within the European Union. While many speculate where tens of thousands of destitute refugees get the money from to pay people smugglers and traffickers, the suspicion arises that the leading proponents and do-gooders launched a grand strategic design for a New World Order against their allies on the European continent. Ethnic and cultural subversion shall help synchronize and conform to the masses and thereby facilitate (world) governance under U.S. preeminence.

We are confronting new faces of contemporary warfare - mass immigration of people from Muslim parts of the world into countries of Christian provenance; de(con)struction of the cultural and moral fabric of western societies; the advancement of progressive secularism; obliteration of traditional family structures; legalization of drugs.

The quarter-century of post-Cold War (world) order did not see the emergence of a definite geostrategic posture based on traditional territorial scenarios and clear front-lines. Instead, an ever-increasing (world) disorder materialized, pushed by global players' reckless policies that side with the U.S. government and its international dominance goal, unchallenged by other nations or regional powers.

The path to this centralized and quite totalitarian World Order is paved, at the bottom, by the weakening, and, in the long run, dissolution of the nation-state concept. A subject matter that will warrant a comprehensive analysis on its own; one that I will provide in a forthcoming essay.

If there is truth to this rough outline of global affairs, then indeed, the madness does have a method!