Cash for Sharia
Abdallah Kamel, chief executive of a banking and real estate company based in Saudi Arabia, donated $10 million to the Yale Law School to create a center for the study of Islamic Law and Civilization, YLS Dean Robert Post and University President Peter Salovey announced Thursday.
Why does Yale Law School want a a center for the study of Islamic Law? I could see a history or sociology department being interested in that, but why a law school? Does Yale teach Christian law?
Also…based in Saudi Arabia. I don’t consider Saudi Arabia a very useful paradigm for the study of law. They behead people for “insulting Islam.” They want to give Raif Badawi 1000 lashes for “insulting Islam.”
Also…Saudi Arabia has been lavishing oil money in secular democracies to set up Wahhabi madrassas which will churn out a new generation of Islamist fanatics. Has Yale looked under the cover at all?
Maybe Abdallah Kamel is an anomaly in Saudia Arabia, a liberal secular intellectual with an open mind. Except if he were that, why would he be funding a center for Islamic law? Religious law is not a good and benign thing, it’s something to fear.
For two decades, Harvard Law School has had its own Islamic legal studies program, established with support from the Saudi king.
Abdullahi An-Na’im, who teaches Islamic law at Emory Law School, said he considers the Islamic legal studies program at Harvard a disappointment because few faculty members took an interest and it has been treated as an isolated entity at the law school. He said it remains to be seen how seriously the Yale faculty will take Islamic law as a field of human jurisprudence.
It’s a field of theocratic jurisprudence. Secular democracies have secular law, not religious law. History departments and political science departments have an interest in religious systems of law, but it’s not clear to me why a secular law school should.
Kronman said Yale aims to have the best program of its kind in the United States, if not the world, and one objective is to ensure the center’s work is integrated into the life of the law school.
Islamic law, or Shariah, carries weight in the legal code of most Muslim countries. Movements to expand its influence, including in areas of the West, have been controversial in part because some interpretations have been used to justify intolerance and harsh punishments.
Kronman said Islamic law is all the more deserving of intellectual attention because many people have views of the subject that are not very well informed.
“It’s the responsibility of universities to teach and instruct and that obligation applies with particular force where an issue or a subject tends to be viewed in an incomplete or inadequate or even caricatured way,” Kronman said. “There the responsibility to teach and enlighten is even stronger.”
So Sharia is actually a completely benign system of laws? Then why is Saudi Arabia the way it is?
One reason a secular law school ought to have an interest in Islamic law is that Islamic law is prevalent in a number of countries in the world. The practice of Islamic law is not necessarily theocratic, in some countries (e.g. India) some personal law is religious but where there is a conflict secular law takes precedence (see recent rulings on age of marriage). In any case, while Islamic law is itself premised on religious texts, the study of Islamic jurisprudence can be as secular as any other form of study.
I don’t know who Kamel is or what strings his donation comes with but Abdullahi An-Na’im is a brilliant scholar.
suya, “the study of Islamic jurisprudence can be as secular as any other form of study.”
the study of Christian jurisprudence can be as secular as any other form of study
the study of Buddhist jurisprudence can be as secular as any other form of study
the study of wiccan jurisprudence can be as secular as any other form of study
There’s religion. There’s secular. Each of these by definition excludes the other.
Are you trying to make sense? Or am I not catching some kind of irony?
Are you unfamiliar with the secular study of religious texts? The premises of the texts under study are separate from the premises of the study itself.
As a matter of fact, there has been some excellent recent secular scholarship on Islamic law, I would suggest Kecia Ali’s recent book on marriage law for one example.
Are you unfamiliar with the stance of giving the author credit for understanding the most basic, fundamental aspects of education? Are you unfamiliar with the blog author at all? You must be, or you wouldn’t ask such a flippant question.
Perhaps, Suya, Abdullahi An-Na’im is a brilliant scholar, but this partial summary of his book Islam and the Secular State, seems particularly lacking in brilliance.
So it is all the fault of European ideas that Islamic states throughout the centuries (including now) have been carrying out jihad against the infidels, wherever they may be found?! Even to suggest that “ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles …” is bordering on the bizarre, if not downright insidious and dishonest. The idea of human rights grew up in an increasingly post-theocratic period in Western civilisation, although basing themselves on ideas developed in Christian scholastic theology. There is no sign that Islam has ever given rise to genuine principles of human rights, nor that the idea of an Islamic state is based on “European ideas of state and law.” Historically, this simply will not stand up. The role of Caliph, for one, was always theocratic, and the supposed relationship of the Caliph to Muhammad was from the beginning closely associated with the role of Caliph. That successive Muslim systems of governance (whether the idea of statehood was, as such, based on Islamic texts) were usually based, originally, on the idea of Islam as a united Ummah, which never did get much purchase on successive (and separate) Muslim statelets and semi-independent spheres of influence and power. But the ideal was always the idea of the Muslemah, territory governed by Sharia according to Islamic principles. The Ottoman caliphate was the latest attempt to unite the Ummah under one head, but it is ridiculous to suppose that this was not a specifically Islamic state which made every effort possible to conquer Europe, an add that to the patrimony of Islam.
Islam wants to claim that everything that is good about the West has an Islamic origin (including the science and mathematics which it inherited from civilisations much greater than Islamic civilisation ever was), and An-Na’im clearly makes every effort to contribute to this endeavour. Of course, you can study Sharia in a secular way, but in that case, you have to stop pretending to any sort of religious supremacy, as An-Na’im clearly does. The question to be asked is: Why would anyone want to study Sharia law, when we can see the devastating consequences of Sharia wherever we care to look in the Muslim world wherever Sharia has got even a toehold? It is an outdated form of theocratic jurisprudence, and we would be better off simply letting it die, given the horror it rightly arouses in any right-thinking person. It is sad that a premier American university should accept money from states that impose Sharia in all its medieval horror to teach the subject in American universities, which should simply condemn it as outdated and oppressive, and pass on to more important pursuits. Mind you, historical research is fine, but that’s where it belongs, not in a law school.
It’s possible that Abdallah Kamel is a disinterested benevolent liberal guy who just happens to think Yale should have a center for the disinterested study of Sharia, and so gave Yale 10 million bucks for that purpose.
It’s possible, I guess, but is it likely?
Saudi Arabia is what it is, and not something else. It’s the homeland of murderous theocratic tyranny. Abdallah Kamel made a fortune there, so it seems pretty unlikely that he’s a dissenter from the murderous theocracy that surrounds him.
Saudi Arabia is also a dedicated exporter of Wahhabism. That fact is a big part of why majority-Muslim countries tend to be such shitholes.
I think it’s unlikely that Abdallah Kamel’s nationality has nothing to do with his donation. I think it’s unlikely that it’s even his money that he so kindly donated to Yale – I think it’s much more likely that he’s laundering it for the Saudi rulers.
As controversial as the decision might be ($10,000,000? The decision doesn’t even rise to surprising) it will be more interesting to see if the amount spent will be warranted by the interest in its being studied or, maybe who attends it.
See, Sharia is a legitimate legal system, there’s a department of Islamic law at Yale. Incredible.
The most powerful threat to liberal democracy isn’t terrorism but creeping Islamisation, particularly when there’s mega amounts of cash involved.
@5 Eric MacDonald
Agreed, however you’ve probably understated the original contributions made to science and culture by Islamic scholars during the civilisation’s “Golden Age”. The factor that distinguishes Islamic from Western civilisation is the former’s inability to assimilate and innovate, in contrast to the West.
I can’t see how their contributions in the area of law from that period require study other than as history. I’ll bet with that $10,000,000 they’ll have a good cafeteria.
To clarify, my post (3) was in response to post (2).
The question to be asked is: Why would anyone want to study Sharia law,
Because lots of people live under sharia. Because someone working in international law or dealing with cross-national situations (e.g. divorce) may have to interface with a sharia-based system. Because many groups base their arguments on classical jurisprudence and people have an interest in engaging their arguments (I’m thinking of Yasir Qadhi et al.’s response to ISIS). Because jurisprudence affects people’s understandings in ways they are not even aware of (something brilliantly discussed in Kecia Ali’s book). Frankly, I cannot understand how anyone can have any sense of solidarity with people living under Muslim religious laws and dismiss the study of Islamic law.
An-Naim is right that the modern Islamic state is based on European ideas, the idea that the jurist who writes the judicial opinion should be the same person who rules in a specific case is new. I could go into more detail, but really, if you dismiss An-Naim, I don’t think an anon commentor has much chance of convincing you.
Of course everyone should be skeptical of how funding affects academic freedom, especially considering the recent example of the Confuciius Institutes. But I really doubt it will be a Madhkali promotion scheme. I took a look at the lecture series that preceded the formation of the Islamic center, and it opened with Rachid Ghannouchi and featured a variety of well-regarded scholars.
suya
Well-regarded by whom? Do these scholars have names? What have they published?
Whether or not this is a good idea, calling people who might support it ‘brilliant’ or ‘well-regarded’ does nothing to bolster the argument.
No heroes.
We need more than some kind of weak celebrity status to convince us that this isn’t an attempt to legitimise an horrific legal system, but is an honest offer to help people understand more about it, the better to undermine and destroy it – which would be the only proper reason to study it at all.