Significantly, there are caveats in Qaradawi’s support for women’s participation in politics. First, he assumes that female officeholders will be “few in number”; therefore, they would pose no danger of achieving general supervision over men, which would be impermissible. More importantly, he reasons that there is no real harm in allowing women to serve in parliament because neither men nor women may make law for themselves in any event. “Legislation belongs to God,” he says, “and we only fill in the blanks.”

This is what Blinken, the State Department, the Biden administration, and Washington’s bipartisan progressive foreign-policy clerisy cannot bear to contemplate. The problem with the Taliban, and sharia supremacists generally, is their imposition of a totalitarian system that is inherently discriminatory and cruel. Whether the Muslims imposing it happen to be men or women, while of great moment to the State Department, is of little moment to sharia supremacists. The system is not open to the discretion of legislators pursuing the interests of their constituents. That is a Western concept that sharia regards as corrupting — inviting the desires of man to take precedence over the instruction of Allah.

Sharia is deemed set in stone. It is Allah’s law, divinely pronounced, so to suggest that its tenets are subject to human refinement is to commit a grave offense. The issue is not whether a few women are allowed to take positions in a sharia government. It is what a sharia government has license to do — namely, to implement sharia’s suffocating standards and enforce them relentlessly.