Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The rise and rise of the Sharia

The past few years – 2014 in particular – have been trying ones for humankind.  On the geopolitical scene, we have seen the re-emergence of the Cold War and the alarming resurgence of international Islamist extremism. At the domestic level, growing numbers of people feel increasingly disenfranchised by laws, regulations and rulings that they view as irrational or unfair (or just plain stupid). 

Many people in both developed and developing countries are losing faith in the structures and institutions of governance – the legislature, the executive, the bureaucracy, the courts. But there is one institution that has been going from strength to strength over the past couple of decades and 2015 is likely to be yet another good year for it: Sharia law.

Ron Smith: On Constitutions

The proposed constitution for Egypt contains a good deal of contentious material and it will be interesting to see how it fares in the referendum, scheduled for this weekend.  As readers of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research know, there are also constitutional projects afoot here in New Zealand.  There are interesting parallels between the two.

In the Egyptian case, and in the context of a ‘virtuous revolution which has unified all Egyptians’, there is an early affirmation of the object of the exercise.  This is to ‘build a modern democratic state’, in which, ‘Equality and equal opportunities are established for all citizens, men and women’.  But all is not as it seems.  As in Orwell’s celebrated story, some (animals) are more equal than others.  In this case the ‘more equal’ are specifically Islamic and masculine.  On the face of it, there is to be ‘no discrimination’ between men and women (this is in the Preamble); but what are we to make of Article 10, ‘The State shall ….enable the reconciliation between the duties of a women toward her family and her work’?  This seems clearly to envisage a restricted status for women, of a kind that, lamentably, is to be found around much of the Islamic world.  More generally, there is limited constitutional protection (and much threat) for minorities such as the Coptic Christians, and any who desire to live in a modern, secular state.