The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran

Description

In recent years, Egypt and Iran have been beset with demands for fundamental change. The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran draws together leading regional experts to provide a penetrating comparative analysis of the ways Islam is entangled with the process of democratization in authoritarian regimes. By comparing Islam and the rule of law in these two nations, one Sunni and Arab-speaking, the other Shi>ite and Persian-speaking, this volume enriches the current debate on Islam and democracy, making for a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of differences with the Muslim world, and provides an indispensible background for understanding the Green movement in Iran since 2009 and the Egyptian revolution of 2011
Preface

Introduction
Saïd Amir Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown

1. Shi‘ite Jurists and the Iranian Law and Constitutional Order in the Twentieth Century
Saïd Amir Arjomand

2. The Special Courts of the Clergy (Dadgah-e Vizheh-ye Ruhaniyyat) and the Repression of Dissident Clergy in Iran
Mirjam Künkler

3. The Principle of Legality in the Iranian Constitutional and Criminal
Silvia Tellenbach

4. Constitutionalism and Parliamentary Struggle for Relevance and Independence in Post-Khomeini Iran
Farideh Farhi

5. The Politics of Property in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Kaveh Ehsani

6. Legal Reforms in Egypt: the Rule of Law and Consolidation of State Authoritarianism
Nathalie Bernard-Maugiron

Appendix: Selections from the 2007 Amendments to the 1971 Constitution
translated by Dina Bishara

7. Rule of Law, Ideology and Human Rights in Egyptian Courts
Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid

8. Islam in Egypt’s Cacophonous Constitutional Order
Nathan J. Brown

9. Surviving under Rule by Law: Explaining Ideological Change in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood
Bruce K. Rutherford

10. Egypt’s ‘Ulama in the State, in Politics and in the Islamist Vision
Jakob Skovgaard-Peteren

11. Egypt’s Constitutional Revolution?
Nathan J. Brown

Sujets

• International relations
• Islam

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438445984
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series, Pangaea II: Global/Local Studies

Saïd Amir Arjomand and Wolf Schäfer, editors

The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran
Edited by
Saïd Amir Arjomand
and
Nathan J. Brown

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Nizer Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The rule of law, Islam, and constitutional politics in Egypt and Iran / Saïd Amir Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown, editors.
p. cm. — (SUNY series. Pangaea II : global/local studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4597-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Rule of law—Iran. 2. Rule of law—Egypt. 3. Judicial process—Iran. 4. Judicial process—Egypt. 5. Constitutional law—Iran. 6. Constitutional law—Egypt. 7. Islam and state—Iran. 8. Islam and state—Egypt. 9. Human rights—Egypt. I. Arjomand, Said Amir. II. Brown, Nathan J.
KMC514.R87 2013
340'.11—dc23
2012017399
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
Pangaea II: Global/Local Studies
This book series of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies engages the global challenges confronting humankind with research, analysis, and education. It aims at empowering individuals and communities to enjoy the benefits and avoid the dangers of globalization. Without political partisanship, the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies will form worldwide partnerships with those who appreciate the vital contribution of academic excellence to achieving these aims. In so doing, it should also contribute to the extension of human rights, security, freedom, and democracy in accord with the diversity of values and cultures throughout the world.
A civilizational project of the global age, Pangaea II is emerging on the scattered geobody that our world maps depict. Pushed forward by globalization and technoscience, Pangaea II is eclipsing the configurations of nature. For the ubiquitous images, sounds, and texts of Pangaea II, earth's current fragmentation into regions, cultures, continents, and islands has vanished. Rapidly branching communication and transportation networks are interweaving widely distributed societies. TV, telephony, and email have escaped from the gravity of the geobody. Pangaea II is pulling the planet together and colonizing near-earth space. Vanquishing the geographic difference between halfway down the corridor and halfway around the globe, Pangaea II is a dense global conglomeration with physical and metaphysical features such as the routers of the Internet and the fallacious belief that global communication should be easy because it has become instant.
Pangaea II: Global/Local Studies is committed to interdisciplinary social science and the integration of fact and theory in a global context. As the hegemony of the Western center of the world system wanes, and with it that of metropolitan social theory, pluralistic approaches to research grow and multiple centers of learning around the globe emerge. We believe in opening the social sciences, removing old disciplinary boundaries, and exploring the intricate dialectic of the global and the local in the production of knowledge. This series embraces the epistemic challenge of the global age; it privileges comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to illuminate the simultaneous local generalization of the global and the global constitution of the local. Understanding this dialectic at the core of globalization and globality is the goal of Pangaea II. Accordingly, the global/local studies published under Pangaea II combine comparative, universal theorizing with various approaches to local knowledge on national and regional topics.
—Saïd Amir Arjomand Wolf Schäfer
Preface
The idea of comparing the rule of law and constitutional politics in Egypt and Iran began with two consecutive conferences entitled “Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law in Egypt and Iran,” held in November 2008. The first was organized by Saïd Amir Arjomand and sponsored by the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies at Stony Brook-Manhattan, and the second was organized by Mirjam Künkler, sponsored by the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS) as a thematic conversation at the annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association in Washington, D.C. It culminated in a workshop held in May 2009 at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Oñati, Spain. We are most grateful to IISL for its generous hospitality and efficient organization, and to ASPS for covering the travel costs of participants without support from their own institutions.
Two major events have intervened between these conferences and the publication of this volume. The first was the massive protest movement in Iran against electoral fraud in the June 2009 presidential elections that began within a month of our last conference and continued through the summer and fall of that year but ultimately failed to change the structure of Iran's theocratic republic. The second is the (as of this writing) indeterminate revolutionary journey Egyptians began on January 25, 2011—one that is motivated by desires to put an end to more than half a century of the authoritarian rule in Egypt. Nathan Brown, who has closely followed this historical watershed, has added an inevitably tentative but nevertheless (we hope!) timely chapter on Egypt's incipient constitutional revolution. On the other hand, a few of the papers presented at our conferences could not be included in the present volume, for understandable reasons. In one case, however, the inclusion of a stimulating and explicitly comparative paper on the relations between central and local government in the two countries was made impossible for political reasons. Its author, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, who participated in the workshop in Oñati, was arrested shortly after returning to Iran in the aftermaths of the fraudulent presidential elections of June 12, 2009, and was later forced to make sham “confessions” in the show trial of the jailed Iranian reformists that followed. His imprisonment broke all communication between him and us as editors of the present volume, and we have been urged by its contributors to express their outrage and to protest to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran his unjust imprisonment, which is in clear and flagrant violation of internationally recognized human rights.
We have used the simplified IJMES transliteration system without diacriticals for Arabic and that of the Journal of Persianate Studies for Persian. The long “a” for the aleph is, however, not indicated in names, except for authors and in the publication titles cited under references.
— Saïd Amir Arjomand Nathan J. Brown
Acknowledgments
The German original of Silvia Tellenbach's chapter, “The Principle of Legality in the Iranian Constitutional and Criminal Law,” was published in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 121 (2009), S.1054–76. DOI: 10.1515/ZSTW.2009.1054. It is reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
An earlier version of Nathan J. Brown's chapter, “Egypt's Constitutional Revolution?,” was published by Foreign Affairs online on February 15, 2011, under the title “Egypt's Constitutional Ghosts.” It is reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs , copyright 2011 by the Council of Foreign Relations, Inc., www.ForeignAffairs.com .
Introduction
The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran
Saïd Amir Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown
A period of global experimentation with, and enthusiasm about, constitutionalism is either drawing to a close or, at best, entering a difficult phase. Constitutionalism will not disappear, but it will find itself grappling with powerful forces of authoritarianism, emergency, nationalism, and the exigencies of administering complex societies. The Arab uprisings of 2011 are testimony to the continuing, even deepening, resonance of constitutionalist ideas but also to the enormous difficulties associated with their pursuit.
The rejection of the Constitution of Europe by France and the Netherlands in the spring of 2005 halted the global trend in constitution making, reversing the move toward increasing juridification of the global order led by the European Union. Up to that time, Europe had led what has been called the “new constitutionalism” that dominated the postcommunist constitutional reconstruction of the 1990s in which the idea of the rule of law was augmented and redefined by the protection of rights through constitutional courts or other organs of judicial review. Around the same time, the U.S.-propelled Security Council Resolution 1373 (September 28, 2001), and the subsequent resolutions requiring the modification of the laws of the member states to conform to the norms of the global war on terrorism set in motion a powerful global co