IslamicLawBlog

Pakistan has been unsuccessful in designing a stable presidency. Two competing models vie for approval. Pakistan’s formulaic constitution, borrowed from the legal-political traditions of England and India, establishes a ceremonial presidency subordinated to parliament. The president with few powers is the head of state and represents the unity of the Republic. The ceremonial presidency empowers elected assemblies to run affairs of the state and provinces in accordance with the wishes of the people. It also spawns political cronyism, allowing politicians to freely broker power relations, distribute ministries and governmental offices on the basis of connection rather than competence and, for the worse, use state resources to advance personal and family interests. The competing model, which Pakistan’s generals as well as American policymakers prefer, institutes a strong presidency – a praetorian presidency – that listens to the armed forces and kow-tows to American interests. Under t...

Pakistan's ruling coalition has finally gathered the courage to impeach Pervez Musharraf who assumed and retained power as the Army Chief for over eight years in violation of the constitution. Musharraf's hold on power collapsed when he took off his military uniform and his political cronies lost the 2008 general elections. Like previous military generals, Musharraf too had a profound messianic complex to single-handedly save Pakistan from real and imagined enemies. Despite its great human and natural resources, Pakistan has remained a Third World country, partly because its civil and military leaders are narcissistic to the extent that they see law as a barrier to their self-assessed greatness to run complex affairs of the state. Musharraf will be fighting impeachment because he fears that his criminality would possibly take him to the gallows. In addition to subverting the constitution more than once, Musharraf has engaged in a series of serious crimes that no decent nation w...

Watch a televised debate on Iranian TV about whether the ICC is doing justice or playing politics in prosecuting Sudanese President Omar-Hassan al-Bashir.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) joins the crusade to defame Islam, demonize internal conflicts in Muslim nations, and prosecute Muslim leaders for crimes against humanity, rape, genocide, and other international crimes. The Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, holds evidence "on crimes committed in the whole of Darfur over the last five years." Ocampo will be seeking the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes committed in Darfur. The ICC is a good idea. We need a world court to hold international criminals accountable. No leader should be able to get away with heinous international crimes. The weakening of personal sovereign immunity is also a welcome legal development in that no leader, army general, senator, representative, or even judge is immune from criminal liability if he or she commits crimes or provides material assistance in the commission of crimes. In practice, however, the ICC is a Western instrumentality that ignores the grave crimes of Wes...

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...