Why sharia feldman

Nope, not even Sharia. Just like past generations of right-wing xenophobic fear-mongers who tried to paint Jewish law known as Halacha in Hebrew in a sinister light; these modern-day peddlers of hate like Newt Gingrich are attempting to do the same with Muslims today. He also pointed out that many Westerners mistakenly believe that Islamic law is not amenable to change in the face of changing circumstances, that it is a system that oppresses women and that by definition it is an enemy of western civilization.

In fact, he stated that Islamic law actually categorically forbids many of the practices that the average person fearfully associates with some Muslims today, like killing innocent people non-Muslims and Muslims alike and stoning women. Gingrich and his sinister ilk. Contact us at letters time. The popularity of Islamist parties, Feldman writes, is a backlash against autocratic rule that has dominated much of the Arab world ever since the disappearance of the one institution that once counterbalanced executive authority: the scholarly class.

That led him to think more deeply about the historical role of scholars in the days before modern Middle Eastern autocracy. Feldman retraces the history of the scholarly class, which once served as the guardian of the law. Rulers uncertain about the lines of succession sought the stamp of legitimacy that scholars could provide.

In turn, the rulers gave scholars wide berth to develop the common law of the Sharia. This arrangement set the pattern for government in the Muslim world after the Ottoman empire fell. Law became a tool of the ruler, not an authority over him.

What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was dictatorship and other forms of executive dominance — the state of affairs confronted by the Islamists who seek to restore Shariah. A Democratic Shariah? The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they are rarely scholars themselves, seem to have little interest in restoring the scholars to their old role as the constitutional balance to the executive.

The Islamist movement, like other modern ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform society through the tools of modern government. Its vision for bringing Shariah to bear therefore incorporates two common features of modern government: the legislature and the constitution.

Something of the sort may slowly be happening in Turkey. The Islamists there are much more liberal than anywhere else in the Muslim world; they do not even advocate the adoption of Shariah a position that would get their government closed down by the staunchly secular military.

Yet their central focus is the rule of law and the expansion of basic rights against the Turkish tradition of state-centered secularism. The courts are under increasing pressure to go along with that vision. Can Shariah provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled.

No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it. But the history of Shariah also shows that the ideals of the rule of law cannot be implemented in a vacuum. I am pleased to see that a westerner understands all of this, and believe that this understanding would lead to acceptance and appreciation of a different point of view, rather than merely a conflicting view.

I think Professor Noah Feldman and Said Amir Arjomand are talking past each other, since they are at different levels of conceptual thought. Arjomand is certainly dealing with the stagnant, repressed brutal culture as lived now in the present moment and experienced by many Muslims, Arab or non-Arab.

However, Professor Feldman views Muslim Islamic culture from the eyes of the historian who actually understands this brilliant culture from a thirteen-century perspective. I view the Middle East from a forty-century perspective. When Islam arose during the six hundreds A.

This temporary lacuna permitted the opening up of a new Oriental religion based on a fresher perspective.

This is the crux of the problem here. If you view religion as mental ignorance, anti-science or intellectual , and mental enslavement, Dr. Said Amir Arjomand is correct. Personally, my afffections are with Dr. Feldman; however, my intelligence is with Dr. He is an eminent sociologist! He has lived and seen these painful realities he so lucidly discusses in his response to Dr. However, Professor Feldman should not be so cavalierly dismissed. A mastery of Classical Hebrew and Classical Arabic informs his working emotional reason.