Tuesday, March 18

Does Shariah mean the rule of law?

An interesting article from Noah Feldman but which curiously misses out many points which I would have thought he should have touched upon.

  • Individual rights primacy over group rights
  • rights of minorities
  • rights of women
  • ability to change
  • same punishment for same crime is not necessarily the same (specially if
    you are of a different minority)
  • Why would a liberal democratic originated jury based codified system
    should give way to a medieval system with all the problems given above?

All the problems Noah mentions are not problems with the current system. I am living in the here and now, and if I steal 5 p, then i would not get my hand cut off, but in some other places, that can happen. The problem is NOW, not 200 years ago, but then this article was a bit
confused in the thinking.

And the sad thing is, the silly archbishop which he mentiones, has had ancestors spend years, decades and centuries spreading a liberal legal system across the world where justice is blind and every body is treated equal, classical liberalism and overturned centuries of strange and bizarre imposition of laws. You notice how Noah Feldman doesn't talk about how Ibn Batuta had problems in every country he went to because he was trying to apply a harsh set of laws on
countries where there they did not apply.

So no, not impressed by the article at all, very confused, limited thinking and did a very poor job of explaining what Sharia was, is and applicability.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

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