IslamicLawBlog

Since August 2008, nearly 60 drone strikes in tribal and other northern areas have massacred over 500 individuals belonging to a population that qualifies as indigenous people under international law. The majority of victims are poor and frightened men, women, and children. They have little to do with militants who are fighting the NATO occupation forces in Afghanistan. To escape future drone massacres of their families, thousands of residents living in target areas, have left their homes and businesses to seek asylum in other parts of Pakistan. Wretched stories of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) and their trail of tears have made little news in the international media. Read more

A UN conference on racism has opened in Geneva amid controversy over a boycott by a number of Western countries prompted by fears that Iran's president would use an address there to launch a verbal attack on Israel. Washington announced "with regret" on April 18 that it would boycott the Durban Review Conference, which already has seen much of the bickering and political infighting that marred the previous conference in South Africa in 2001. The five-day gathering is the UN's first global racism conference in eight years. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned at its outset that racism is one of the most pressing issue facing humanity. Read on

The firepower logic, most familiar to students of colonialism, exceptionalism, racism, and superpower piracy, is astounding. Here is a multiple choice question: (a) 3 Africans = 1 American (b) 3 pirates = 1 captain (c) 3 Blacks = 1 White The willingness to kill has been the lingering logic of supremacy. Is killing necessary to prevent piracy?

Abrogation is a classical concept of Islamic law, which allows jurists to organize the normative complexity of divine texts. As a rule of temporality, abrogation invalidates prior rules found incompatible with subsequent rules. By stretching the rule, critics and reformers of Islamic law wish to abrogate substantial portions of the Quran and the Prophet's Sunnah. This methodology of modernizing Islamic law secures no following in the Muslim world, which jealously defends the integrity of divine texts. Jurodynamics of Islamic law offers a sophisticated methodology, which respects the integrity of divine texts, retains the jurisprudential heritage of past centuries, but at the same time modernizes legal systems to absorb modernity and constantly evolving spatiotemporal realities. No dynamic legal tradition cuts loose from the past or dwells exclusively in the past. Jurodynamics is the study of Shariah norms in motion, signifying both stability and change. Jurodynamics recognizes the ...