Traditional Islamic law has long been regarded as academic, local in nature, and relevant only as a measure of the inadequacy of women's rights in the family law regimes of a few Islamic states. In opposition, the author argues that the Sharia is both a quasi-regional customary international law capable of competing with prevailing customary international law, and brings its own international agenda of "Islamic human rights" that compete with and seek to displace "Western human rights." Rather than acknowledging the rights of Muslims qua Muslims internationally, aggressive proponents of an...

The delayed development of the Islamic world, in defiance of the
formulaic approaches long favored by economists, suggests that the
traditional Sharia and Islamic values and principles are at least
partially responsible for the regions persistent backwardness. By analyzing the impact of the legal regime of the Sharia on Saudi Arabia during the Arab Oil Bust of the 1980s, this thesis concludes that Islamic social values and the Sharias de facto role as an uncodified pre-emptive Arab common law implemented with high regard to precedent by ulama with extraordinary power of judicial review had...

During the revolutionary period the Soviets came into political and cultural conflict with Russia's Muslims. Despite indications that the majority of Muslims desired political unification based on their Islamic heritage, the Party divided them into separate "nationalities" along narrow ethnic lines, incorporated most into the RSFSR, and attempted to uproot traditional Islamic institutions and customs under the aegis of class war. Resistance took the form of pan-Muslim nationalism, a reformist political conception with roots in the Near East. This conflict not only aborted the export of...