| Indhold: |
This course is a little bit an experiment. It aims to bring together graduate law students with their peers from the humanities, to jointly explore one of the most interesting contemporary challenges: the redrawing of constitutional order across the Muslim world, not least throughout the rebellious Arab lands.
The focus of the course lies on modern constitutional developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. Previous developments –especially the large body of classical writing on the Islamic state– will feature only on the margins to illuminate contemporary developments.
Three common themes will characterise the course:
1.We privilege the study of the legal and social reality and seek to highlight where it is at odds with dogmatic stipulations, be they religious or constitutional.
2.We seek to illustrate the practical tensions posed by limited administrative capabilities and political legitimacy that resulted from the incomplete reception of modern bureaucratic statehood.
3.We seek to examine how popular dissatisfaction with the practical performance of Muslim governments has fuelled demands for greater accountability under the guise of cultural authenticity.
Ultimately, the course aims to equip participants to better understand Muslim contemporary discourse about the res publica, better contextualise the demands for religious law in public life, and to better ascertain the theoretical and practical feasibility of postulated religious alternatives to the still-dominant secular model of governance.
By choice and necessity, this course will be interdisciplinary and has no prerequisites. No knowledge of Arabic or other Oriental languages is assumed; neither is previous familiarity with the study of religion in general and Islamic beliefs in particular; nor with the legal method in general and constitutional law in particular. Rather than assuming a common frame of reference, it is expected that students’ diverse disciplinary backgrounds will complement each other. The reading seeks to balance the breath of epistemological and methodical backgrounds by offering remedial literature to fill respective lacunae.
An integral part of the course will be an international conference to be held 18-19 February 2013 on the premises of the Law Faculty. Participants in this course are warmly welcomed, indeed expected, to attend and contribute actively.
At the conclusion of the course, students should have acquired the ability to:
Identify broad commonalities in the constitutional experience of major Muslim nations;
• Identify the major differences in the legal and political bsystems of these countries;
•Differentiate the different roles played by constitutions: as normative declamations, negotiated settlements, and distributors of functional mandates;
•Identify and critically evaluate the role of colonial practices in shaping legal and constitutional systems;
•Present and evaluate the major modern political movements and their respective constitutional visions;
•Appreciate the influence of wider global events on the Muslim constitutional discourse;
•Evaluate the logical coherence of religiously-inspired theories of government;
•Evaluate the comparative performance of different constitutional arrangements;
•Evaluate the normative and practical challenges posed by religion in public life;
•Put the current constitutional renegotiations into historical, national, and international perspective;
•Argue carefully and logically for and against specific legal positions in factual context, present the theoretical foundations for those arguments, and make reasoned choices in terms of public policy;
•Formulate and communicate ideas and legal issues;
•Utilize international and foreign legal materials, and historical accounts, in a coherent, competent, and professional way.
|