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This Article maps the criminal law system in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia enacted a criminal procedure code in 2001, but it lacks a comprehensive penal code, relying instead on (i) identifications of certain acts as violations of the law (from public behavior to matters of the state administrative cogwheel) scattered in various pieces of legislation and (ii) the classical Islamic legal tradition’s classification forming a criminal Islamic common law which is organized into (a) “set punishment” prescribed crimes (hadd, plural hudud), (b) crimes left to the court’s discretion (ta‘zir), and (c) two other forms of “violations of the body” with their own legal regime (qisas/retaliation and diya/blood money). The Article is based on extensive case law released by the Saudi Ministry of Justice.

Tom Ginsburg's concept of “authoritarian international law” (AIL) is as important as the one it references, Thomas Franck's “right to democratic governance.” It underlines how the promise carried by Franck was betrayed in the bitter turn of history that ended the emerging hope for democracy ruling all nations in the world after 1989. This hope had developed by fits and starts as the slow fulfilment of the Kantian project for “perpetual peace” amongst a world federation of democratic republics on which the League of Nations and the United Nations were built. To the now-universal acknowledgment of the grave domestic setbacks to human rights and democracy, Ginsburg's article adds an account of the international setbacks which followed. Its chief importance is in raising the question of the emergent authoritarian traits of international law in the wake of these setbacks. With my appreciation of Ginsburg's formidable treatment, including a title that will mark, like Franck's, an important moment in the field, I will challenge some of his conclusions and offer counterpoints in the present essay. In particular, I will (1) suggest the irrelevance of the three “evils of AIL”; (2) highlight the significance of 2006 as the date when AIL started rising; (3) emphasize the importance of U.S. isolationism in the rise of AIL; and (4) argue that the better investment to counter that rise is in nonviolence.

Against the sceptics, who see nonviolence as a serendipitous occurrence of the Middle East Revolution, the reality is that of a powerful, conscious determination of the revolutionaries in at least three countries where repression was immense, and where people refused to take up arms after the nonviolent precedents in Tunisia and in Egypt. In Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, the refusal to resort to violence is a conscious choice of hundreds of thousands of people. Th at clear appreciation of the power of nonviolence, in contrast to the revolutionaries in Libya, is the leitmotive of the Middle East Revolutions. Th e rebels in Libya made a mistake in taking up arms against Qaddafi , and lost Tripoli on the very day when the military front was constituted. Yet the rule remains, across the ME Revolution from the beginning of the paradigmatic shift in January 2011, in the attachment to nonviolence as the privileged means to revolutionary success.

DESPITE A RICH history, beginning with the Ottoman constitutional movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century and that of Qajar Iran at the beginning of the twentieth, Middle Eastern constitutions have a propensity to turn into dead letters. Unless and until constitutional watchdogs begin to protect the rights of citizens and subjects in a manner compatible with the generous display of constitutional liberties and entitlements in the supreme texts, the rule of constitutional law will be constrained by the needs of contemporary decision-makers. The absence of constitutional protection results from the combined legacy of historical pressures (which, in the twentieth century, undermined the liberal experience) and the noted absence of any influence of the American legal tradition. Whether in the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty or in the French tradition of a supreme Civil Code, the colonial experiment in the Middle East left behind as its legacy a judiciary that was powerless to assess the legality of a statute in terms of the supreme law of the land. Constitutions, where they exist, serve to regulate the operation of non-judicial institutions and are important only to the extent of providing a general scheme of executive and legislative power, as well as offering a measure of legitimacy in times of crisis. During the last decade, disparate and seemingly unrelated factors have converged to remove the constitutional texts from their ivory towers of ineffectiveness in various Middle Eastern countries, and new independent judicial bodies have been entrusted with the responsibility of protecting and implementing the previously innocuous fundamental texts. Two Middle Eastern countries have established independent judicial bodies with constitutional competence. The first, and most successful, is the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (al-mahkama aldustariyya al-'ulya), introduced by the Constitution of 1971 and effectively established in 1980. At nearly the same time, the Iranian Constitution of 1979 stipulated that all legislation must be in conformity with Islamic law and with the Constitution and created a Council of

Our purpose is to examine the significance of the Sunni-Shi'i unity (or divide) in Iraq upon the adoption of a unified Code of Personal Status in 1959. By way of caveat, it must be emphasised at the outset that several constraints are characteristic of any research on Iraq. Sources are scarce and reports of the shun'a courts were not accessible. The development of case law, which Professor Anderson had described in his seminal commentary on the Code in 1960 as central to the analysis of the status of personal law,l has therefore not been possible. But there were other ways which could be probed, and the present article looks into the problems across the Shi'i-Sunni divide which the Code faced in its early days. The discovery of a treatise emanating from the Shi'i circles most opposed to the unification of the law, as well as the lieu which formed the backbone of this opposition, will serve as points of focus for a reassessment of the Iraqi family Code in its "udied personal law system v. community personal laws" dimension.2 Be treatise which forms the basis of the reassessment was published in Najaf in 1963. It was written by a promising young scholar, Muhammad Bahr al-'Ulum.3 Bahr al-'Ulum, who was born in 1927, belongs to a Shi'i family famous for its scholarship in

This article examines comparative law in Islamic/Middle Eastern legal culture. The first section discusses the comparative framework in Islamic law and civilization. The second section describes the rule of law in the prism of the legal profession. The third section discusses the notions of public and private in issues such as constitutions, contracts, and torts, and family law. A millennium and a half after the Islamic revelation, unrest and violence associated with the Islamic/Middle Eastern world make one wonder, from a comparative perspective, whether West and East are not on a collision course precisely because of their diametrically opposed concepts of law. On the Western side, law is associated with nation-states and their territory; on the Islamic/Middle Eastern side, law is dominated by the personal dimension, defined by an individual’s religious, and often sectarian identity.

Democracy as unwavering principle is the only possible voluntarist response to present and future crises resulting from any cultural misunderstanding between East and West. Cosmopolitanism as response to Globalism is the Kantian cultural precondition on the way to a violence-less, then violence-free world. Within the shift to cosmopolitanism is required a Clausewitz-like reflection on war and the conditions for the external use of violence for democratic purposes. Progressivism is a cultural reference point of unsuspected potentiality, to be set by heirs of the socialist and social-democratic tradition in the right-left divide.

Introduction The law governing the Nile waters can be assessed against a background of several legal traditions, including the domestic laws of individual riparians, documented decisions of federal courts in countries like Australia, Germany or the United States, existing regional arrangements on international rivers, Nile-specific agreements between the basin states, as well as customary law, particularly among the peoples of the basin. There is a vast literature on the subject, and the purpose of this chapter is not to review the subject overall but is much more modest in scope. Discussion will be limited to two traditions which could be of particular relevance to the subject of the Nile: the present reassessment and formulation of international watercourse systems law, and the Islamic legal tradition and some of its possible bearing on the law of water. As for public international law, a survey of some recent developments is based on a comparison between the draft text established in the course of the 1980s by the International Law Commission, and the Restatement of the International Law Association in 1966, known as the Helsinki Rules. The factor-analysis approach, which is at the root of the international law experts' philosophy in both instances, will be assessed in the light of the Nile case. This is followed by an appraisal of some strands of the legal tradition offered by selected texts of the sharī'a , with particular emphasis on their possible contribution to a comprehensive legal agreement on the management of the Nile resources.

Part 1 Classical perspectives: consultation and the political process in the Islamic Middle East of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries legal literature and problem of change - the case of Egypt appellate review of judicial independence in Islamic law the law and the Mufti - evidence from 15th-century Morocco. Part 2 Contemporary dimensions: the role of 'urf in shaping the traditional Islamic city Islamic law and state legislation on religious conversion in India Islam and public law in Malaysia - some reflections in the aftermath of Susie Teoh's case Majlis al-Dawla - the administrative courts of Egypt and administrative law the jurisprudence of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court contemporary reinterpretations of Islamic law.

(1988). Religious militancy in contemporary Iraq: Muhammad Baqer as‐Sadr and the Sunni‐Shia paradigm. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 699-729.