On June 28, 2012, the British Council, Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, Interfaith Alliance, and the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum hosted a day of panel discussions, “Reason vs. Rhetoric: Understanding American Muslims.”

In this panel, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, Julie Macfarlane, Sadakat Kadri, and Marc Stern define sharia law in legal and cultural terms. They illuminate how the debate about sharia has been dealt with in the political arena and by the media and how sharia compares to other religious systems of law practiced in the United States.