Islamic Law & Law of the Muslim World eJournal: Sept 7th

This week’s issue of the Islamic Law & Law of the Muslim World eJournal includes:

Islam and Women Rights in Pakistan” by Ihsan Yilmaz and Zahid Shahab Ahmed

This paper analyzes the impact of two constitutional bodies with the power to perform ijtihād—the Council of Islamic Ideology and the Federal Shariat Court—on women’s rights in Pakistan.

Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State by SHARIAsource Egypt and Malaysia Editor Tamir Moustafa

This book, published open-access by Cambridge University Press, examines how Malaysia’s legal system has created a ‘rights-versus-rites binary’ in law, politics, and the popular imagination. Drawing on controversial court cases and public debates, it shows how legal institutions catalyze ideological struggles, which stand to redefine the nation and its politics. Probing the links between legal pluralism, social movements, secularism, and political Islamism, the book sheds new light on the confluence of law, religion, politics, and society.

Law and Society in the Evolution of Malaysia’s Capital Market Regulation” by Vivien Chen

This forthcoming article in the Asian Journal of Law and Society examines the development of regulations in Malaysia for the growing Islamic finance sector. The regulations reflect a merger of corporate law drawn from Malaysia’s common-law heritage with sharīʿa principles. However, the sharīʿa and common-law components of Islamic financial regulation have evolved along two separate and seemingly inconsistent trajectories: while the secular corporate law component continues to evolve in tandem with its common-law tradition, development of the sharīʿa component represents a distinct shift away from common-law traditions.


Also posted to SSRN this week was a chapter from a 2016 book published by the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights called Death Penalty and the Victims:

Outlier: Iran and its Use of the Death Penalty” by Ahmed Shaheed and Faraz Sanei

This paper draws attention to the use of the death penalty in Iran. Iran ranks second in the world in the number of executions carried out (behind China), and first in executions per capita. In addition, Iran is the number one executor of juvenile offenders despite recent amendments made to its penal code to address this issue, and remains one of only a handful of countries that still carries out such executions (in violation of international law).

For more on this topic, see the SHARIAsource commentary, “Iran’s New Islamic Penal Code: Have International Criticisms Been Effective for Children and Juvenile Offenders?”