IslamicLawBlog

Obama campaign strategy toward Muslims is shortsighted June 27, 2008 By Junaid M. Afeef Many Muslim voters love Sen. Barack Obama. It seems Obama does not have quite as much affection for his Muslim supporters. Muslim voters support Obama for many reasons, but a shared faith is not one of them. Muslim voters know Obama is Christian. That does not matter. What does matters to many Muslim voters are his life experiences, his worldview and his position on a myriad of domestic issues. When Muslim voters look at Obama, they see a leader who will restore civil liberties. In him they see a president who values diplomacy, and as one young Muslim professional commented on a listserv, they see someone who will bring an "informed international perspective." Muslim voters look at Obama and they hope that, as a person of color who has experienced racism in his life, he will be sensitive to bigotry and bias in all of its manifestations, including racism, anti-semitism and Islamophobia. Reg...

Islamic Agreements in American Courts: An interesting dispute litigated in a Texas appellate court (partial dissent here) having to do with "a Mahr[, which] is an Islamic religious custom whereby the husband contracts to give the wife a sum of money, either at the time of the marriage or deferred in the event of a divorce." Some of the most interesting arguments -- "those regarding the Establishment Clause, public policy, and Islamic law" -- were found to be waived, and the decision rested on fairly technical questions. Still, it might give one a sense of the kinds of cases that are likely being litigated elsewhere, and are likely to be litigated in the future. As I mentioned before, I think the right approach for the American legal system is to simply enforce these contracts as written, without regard to their religious character. Some such contracts might be unenforceable because they are supposedly substantively or procedurally "unconscionable" (a prett...

On February 18, 2007, the people of Pakistan elected two major anti-establishment political parties, giving them a mandate to restore high court judges whom Army Chief Prevez Musharraf had dismissed, and to re-establish the rule of law. The political parties that had supported the non-democratic establishment were defeated in the February general elections. Despite this triumph of democracy over dictatorship, Pakistans constitutionalism remains confused. Confusion has particularly gripped the dominant political party (PPP) that benefitted from the military rule to the extent that all criminal cases against the party chief, Asif Ali Zardari, were quashed. This manumission of the PPP Chief from criminal action created sympathies for the current Supreme Court, which validated constitutional subversion and the consequent removal of high court judges, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. This article argues that the rule of law cannot be established in Pakistan unless the ruling elit...

It is puzzling that Yale University invited Tony Blair, the war criminal, to speak at the graduation ceremony. Along with others, this man is the author of the unjustified and genocidal war in Iraq. Called the Bush poodle, war criminal Blair walks freely as a hero. Shame on Yale!