New in America: Not Muslim, No Taxi

Islamic taxi drivers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport are refusing passengers carrying alcohol and blind folks with seeing-eye dogs because the animals' saliva is sacrilege according to Sharia law.

The enterprising Muslims during the past year have stranded 100 passengers a month, sometimes for more than an hour, according to the Metropolitan Airports Commission, since three-fourths of the 900 taxi drivers servicing the airport are Somali Muslims who have decided to participate in the new discipline.

To make matters worse, a local outreach director of the ever-obliging Council on American-Islamic Relations, Damon Drake, dismissed the issue, saying, "Now that the Muslims are here, they need to be accommodated."

The issue originated 12 months ago when the airports commission received a fatwa, or religious edict, from the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society. It stated that "Islamic jurisprudence" prohibits taxi drivers to carry passengers with alcohol "because it involves cooperating in sin."

One solution, Islamic zealots suggested, would be to designate the majority of cabs following the practice with special colors, or lights, so that passengers would not hold their breath — which is tantamount to telling a newly stranded passenger: "I am Muslim, and I choose not to give you a ride. Tough luck."

This plan was abandoned when airport officials determined that it might cause people to avoid using taxis altogether.

It is not possible to massage this into further outrage, but there is plenty of need to wonder about wider meanings and consequences, not to mention why such a situation was allowed to drag on with no decisive action to date.

Even if one could dismiss such shenanigans as a humorous episode that escaped nationwide attention until recently and will soon go away, what of the next challenge?

What if Islamic drivers deny the right of transportation to women wearing short skirts, robed priests and rabbis, or homosexual couples, as indeed has happened in Minneapolis?

And what to do should conductors, pilots, and stewards on trains and planes insist they should not transport unveiled women or serve alcohol. How far off is the day when emboldened imams in neighborhoods where American Muslims are in the majority, such Dearborn, Mich., demand the broadcasting of the calls to prayer over loudspeakers at dawn and at other times. Farfetched? Not at all. A few months ago, a naturalized Australian imam, Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali, who came from Egypt, raised a storm when he likened unveiled Australian women to "uncovered meat that draws predators."

These are neither polemic nor frivolous questions given a cultural process that accepts that Islamic taxi drivers possess "religious rights" overriding public service codes and America's separation of church and state.

Indeed, in the past decade, Muslims in America, Europe, and Australia have become caught up in a proselytizing frenzy, attempting to force the very Western societies to which they migrated for better pay and greater freedom into new social covenants.

What they overlook is that much of the West spent much blood and sweat to construct models of personal freedom and secular space that should not be abandoned by Westerners for some Saudi-style Islamic kingdom of darkness.

In that respect, it is useful to recall comments by Prime Minister Howard of Australia, who on the 10th anniversary of retaining his elected function last February, told Australian Muslims: "All migrants have to integrate, and that means speaking English as quickly as possible. It means embracing Australian values, and it also means making sure that no matter what the culture of the country from which they come might have been, Australia requires women to be treated fairly and equally and in the same fashion as men. If any migrants that come into this country have a different view, they better get rid of that view very quickly."

This is not a matter of the American way or the highway. It is not about booze, dogs, veils, or social norms. It is about the sum total of civilized societies and the rule of secular laws. Intrusions upon these systems in the name of God, Sharia law, or Islamic jurisprudence is a very big deal indeed and must be handled as such.

This is why the matter of taxi drivers imposing their Islamic religious fatwas is nothing less than a continuation of that thing we call the "war of civilizations."