My friend and colleague at the American University in Cairo has published on his Facebook page a note in which he provides 32 reasons to vote no for the current constitution.  I have a few general comments to Khaled’s excellent discussion below:

My friend and colleague at the American University in Cairo has published on his Facebook page a note in which he provides 32 reasons to vote no for the current constitution.  I have a few general comments to Khaled’s excellent discussion below:

Does Islamic law have a conception of sovereign immunity? Yes, and it is derived from the notion of the public official as a public agent.  This relationship defines both why it is obligatory to obey lawful acts of a public agent.– because one is always bound by the lawful acts taken by one’s own agent — and why one is not bound by the ruler’s unlawful acts — because an agent’s unlawful acts are beyond the scope of his agency and are thus that of a private person and not of an agent. 

The Egyptian Constitutional Assembly has finally completed a draft constitution for post-revolutionary Egypt, issuing it to the Egyptian public for their consideration almost a month ago.  (An English translation of the draft may be found here.)  As is the case with everything in post-revolutionary Egypt, the draft has proven to be extremely controversial, and has elicited widespread criticism, particularly from human rights organizations for its failure to meet international norms with respects to rights of women, children and freedom of religion.  Ellis Goldberg, meanwhile, has published a lengthy and very thoughtful analysis of the draft text in two parts on his blog, Nisr al-Nasr (Part I and Part II).

I presented this paper in the fall of 2009 at a conference on minorities and Islamic law in Kuala Lampur sponsored by the Muslim World League and the International Islamic University.  It was my first time in Malaysia, but given the time difference (13 hours), I didn’t get much of an opportunity to see much of Malaysia.  In any case, it appears that my paper will be published along with some of the other papers presented at that conference.  This amounts to a pleasant surprise.

There is little doubt that religious commitments often conflict with political ones, at least in circumstances where religious commitments are considered to be transcendental, and at least some of them will ultimately be non-negotiable for their adherents. In Islam, the prohibition against intentionally killing other Muslims or waging war against them are examples of such commitments Muslims may have that can cause them to question the validity of certain political obligations.  This dilemma has become even more acute for American Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the decision of the United States government to fight a global war on “terrorism” which goes well-beyond the immediate perpetrators of 9/11.  In these circumstances, and particularly because many Muslims feel obligations of solidarity with other Muslims they are under attack, e.g., ‘Iraq, what is the responsible course of conduct for American Muslims?  In this essay published first in the Islamic Monthly, I put forward an argument that requires American Muslims to create a language of critical citizenship, one that incorporates Islamic moral concerns in a critique of US policy, but at the same time transforms Islamic moral concerns into more universal ones, with the hope of creating a political discourse that reconciles the political values of modern liberal citizenship with the political values of Islam.

Ray Ibrahim, writing in the Middle East Forum, suggested that because the Mufti of Egypt, ‘Ali Jumu’a, had in the weeks preceding the massacre in Maspero, reiterated core Islamic teachings about the falsehood of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, he must also believe that Muslims should fight Christians until they are all subdued, in accord with what, according to Ibrahim, is the Quran’s “plain teachings” as set out in Quran 9:29.  In short, Ibrahim suggests that it is contradictory for Jumu’a to cite the Quran’s condemnation of the Trinity and then claim (as he lukewarmly does) that peaceful coexistence is required, despite the falsehood of Christian theology in light of the Quranic verse Ibrahim cites.

The special issue of the journal Middle East Law and Governance dedicated to the Arab Spring has just come out.  I contributed a short piece arguing that the best ideological framework from which the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions can be understood is from the perspective of Islamic Modernism.  The essay makes that case through a brief discussion of the political thought of three important 19th and 20th century Muslim modernist thinkers: Rafi’ Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (Egypt); Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi (Ottoman/Tunisian); and Muhammad Rashid Rida (Syrian-Egyptian).  As always, comments are appreciated.

I had the honor of giving the keynote address at the 2011 Meeting of the “Society of Pakistani Canadian Professionals & Academics.  My talk was titled “Reasonable Accommodation in a Democratic Society.”   Comments, as usual, are always welcome.

The latest issue of the Journal of the American Oriental Society contains my lengthy review essay of Professor Wael Hallaq’s latest work, Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations.  It is available for download from my ssrn page here.  As always, I welcome comments.

Earlier this summer, I appeared along with Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a professor of philosophy at York University, along with Maya Shatzmiller, a historian specializing in economic history of the Islamic Middle East, Janice Stein, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, and Clifford Orwin, a professor of political philosophy, to discuss the future of the Arab world in light of the region’s various revolutions.  Here is a link to the broadcast, which was aired on August 5, 2011.  Unlike other discussions of the Arab Spring, this focused more on long-term issues, such as questions of economic development and issues of political thought (Islam and democracy and the Arab world).