"Muslim-Americans must exercise extreme diligence

in reminding themselves of a fundamental difference between the American and the Islamic legal systems. In America law, the legal process (i.e., the system for adjucating disputes in court) is coextensive with the system's body of legal rules. Every legal rule, in other words, is the basis for a civil or criminal action. While there are certain "sensitive areas" in which society insists that "law stays out," these are protected by simply insisting that these areas be exempted from both legal rules and legal contemplation. In other words, such sensitive issues as, for example, whether or not a mother breast-feeds her child are left to custom, religion, popular morality, malicious gossip, or other means. In the event, however, that Americans should decide there be a legal rule governing this issue, this would mean, ipso facto, that civil or criminal liabilities would attach thereto. [45]

In Islamic law, on the other hand, "sensitive areas" are protected not by insisting that they be exempt from legal rules but by exempting them from legal sanctions. In other words, the scope of Islamic legal sanctions is significantly narrower than the scope of Islamic law. That is to say, Islamic law includes many legal rules that are essentially moral exhortations that carry no civil or criminal sanctions in the Here and Now and over which no court or coercive power has any jurisdiction. [46] Thus, for example, while abortion, even during the first trimester, is forbidden according to a minority of jurists, it is not held to be an offensive for which there are criminal or even civil sanctions. [47] On this understanding, Muslim-Americans who oppose abortion should assiduously limit their activism to the moral sphere and avoid supporting positions that favor the imposition of criminal or civil sanctions in an area into which Islamic law itself never contemplated injecting these. [48] Indeed, this is an issue on which Islam's own version of the separation between religion and state should be assiduously observed. [49]

-Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking toward the Third Resurrection by Sherman Jackson, pgs. 150-1

footnote # 47: "Traditionally, the majority has held abortion to be permissible through the first trimester (120 days), at which time, according to a Prophetic hadith, ensoulment takes place and the fetus becomes a human. All of the schools impose a prima facie ban after 120 days."