OPINION:
Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier who died in Iraq, picked a fight with Donald Trump and did pretty well at it. For awhile. But he can’t let it go. Celebrity from the headlines and soundbites are going to his head. Now he says the Donald’s mistakes aren’t necessarily his fault because Allah makes him do it.
Mr. Khan told Pakistani interviewers the other day that his speech at the Democratic National Convention, when he accused Mr. Trump of having “a black soul” and set off a argument that ran for several news cycles in the media, was a gift from Allah. “I showed the [U.S.] Constitution only because I wanted to remind people that nobody could be discriminated against because of religion.”
That’s a good reminder for everyone, and needed often, particularly in Washington. In fact, Mr. Khan might remind himself that the Constitution, as printed in the little copy of it that he waved for the cameras at the convention, is the supreme law of the land in the America that he calls home. Mixing theology and politics is a no-no.
Mr. Khan might or might not believe that, though he is a lawyer who admires Shariah law. In an academic paper he wrote while studying in Saudi Arabia, “Juristic Classification of Islamic Law,” he wrote that Islamic law should prevail over all. “The invariable and basic rules of Islamic law are only those prescribed in the Shariah,” he wrote. “All other … juridical works must always be subordinated in the Shariah.” The Koran, he wrote, “is the absolute authority from which springs the very conception of legality and every legal obligation.”
Mr. Khan is a co-founder of the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law, which defends the arcane particulars of Shariah, sometimes cited as justifying the killing of homosexuals, prostitutes, “blasphemers” and “apostates,” loosely defined. He once wrote a glowing review of a book by A.K. Brohi, a onetime Pakistani minister of legal and religious affairs, writing that Mr. Brohi “argues convincingly for the establishment of a moral value system before guarantees can be given for any kind of rights. To illustrate the point, he notes that ’there is no such thing as human right in the abstract.’”
That seems odd from a man who waves a copy of the U.S. Constitution about when making a speech. The media that made Mr. Khan a hero have little time for examining the particulars of a narrative. It was enough that Mr. Khan was for Hillary, that he doesn’t like Donald Trump and that he knows a blackened soul when he sees one. Mr. Khan should quit while he’s ahead. His son was an American hero, his son’s father, not so much.
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