Part memoir, part history and part Qur'anic exegesis, the author provides an unsettling catalogue of Sharia-based practices: the subjugation and brutalization of women, the persecution of homosexuals, honour killings, the beheading of apostates and the stoning of adulterers. Unlike others who attribute such barbarities to extremism or fundamentalism or the hijacking of a "peaceful" religion by fanatics, Darwish doesn't flinch: Such depraved practices arise directly from the Qur'an itself, a text that is "violent, incendiary, and disrespectful."

Darwish is careful to distinguish between people and ideas: "The purpose of this book is not to spread hatred of a people but to tell the truth about the wickedness of Islamic Sharia law." She divides her book into "The Family" and "The State" and, under these two banners, documents the injustices, the suffering and cultural backwardness perpetuated under Islam and Sharia. These squalid practices extract a price: Ultimately, she writes, Sharia destroys a nation's "inner vitality, blurs its vision, befogs its critical facilities, and .... saps all the springs of culture." How, she wonders, could once great nations - Egypt, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Turkey - have "strangled themselves with the most barbaric, oppressive, and demeaning laws on earth for fourteen hundred years."

Darwish is at her best when contrasting Sharia law with Western conceptions of justice. She is particularly zealous in her defence of individual freedom and equality before the law, both of which are alien to Islam. While Western morality stems from a belief in the inherent dignity of the person and so revolves around such central concepts as personal autonomy and individual conscience, Islam demands from its adherents total "submission" (its literal meaning) to the word of Allah. In stark contrast to our bedrock notion of creedal forbearance and equality before the law, Sharia divides the world into Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission, and the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so-called because it will take holy war (jihad) to bring it into the House of Submission. Islamic jurisprudence is thus dualistic, dividing the world into Muslims and everyone else. It stands in stark contrast to notions of religious pluralism, and treats "infidels" (non-believers) as inferiors, producing laws that "subjugate and humiliate non-Muslims, and that produce a dysfunctional and angry society." Darwish remarks that "Americans ... cannot comprehend that an entire religion and its culture believes God orders the killing of unbelievers." But what is truly terrifying is the catastrophic reality of women under Sharia law. Camouflaged as Allah's will, "The oppression of women, sexual enslavement, and even violence and murder were given honourable names."

Darwish analyzes the dire consequences - for both the individual and the society - of such practices as polygamy, "temporary marriages" (prostitution), divorce (the husband repeats "I divorce you" three times) and child marriage (pedophilia). But most horrific of all is the Sharia-endorsed practice of honour killing. Women who bring shame and disgrace to their families (for such "crimes" as being raped, or for talking to a male in public without a chaperone) are killed to restore the family's honour - in the name of Allah.

Darwish is unequivocal: Wherever it has been instituted, Sharia law has resulted in a morally repugnant, codified misogyny. For Muslim apologists to suggest otherwise is casuistry, pure and simple. Simply put, Sharia is incompatible with any state that has as a foundational principle the equality of the sexes before the law. She condemns those who perpetuate the Sharia-endorsed hatred of women, and rebukes those who, faced with the status of women under Sharia, are complicit by their silence.

Multiculturalism is premised on the belief that there exists a moral equivalency among cultures and religions. For Darwish, this is either naïve sentimentality or a willful turning away from reality. Just as the human body finds some substances toxic, so too are some ideas and practices inimical to human flourishing. The reality is that Islam and Sharia form a retrograde ideology that adds greatly to the world's stock of misery. Accordingly, Darwish asks that we speak frankly about what the Qur'an demands from believers, and consider carefully Islam's brutal and impoverished vision. The West, she says, must face up to this stark truth.

----Patrick Keeney is the North American editor of Prospero. He is based in Kelowna, B.C.