Sharia, human rights, and everything good

In one vast revolutionary wave in 2011, citizens of several Arab countries managed to overthrow regimes that seemed powerful and stable. As the stated aim of these revolutions was to restore national institutions and politics from what they considered usurpers, it is not surprising that the political attention soon moved to the task of establishing new political orders.

If 2011 was the year of the revolutions, 2012 promised to become the year of the constitutions. But the constitutional processes did not move along smoothly; there was a power vacuum to be filled, and oppositional forces who had united in the overthrow of the regimes soon discovered their ideological diversity. What is perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the new constitutions, when finally promulgated, ended up looking much like the old ones. In particular, one already highly controversial provision in the old constitutions, the reference to the Sharia, ended up being retained more of less word by word in the new ones. Why is that?

This working paper seeks to investigate what happened to the specifically Islamic clauses, and offer some reflections on their role in the political process in these Arab countries.

The working paper is a revised version of a presentation given at the workshop Claims to Justice: Islamic Law and Constitutional Debates in the Middle East hosted by the Danish Institute for Human Rights 5. December 2013.

About the author

Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Dr. Phil, is Professor at the New Islamic Public Sphere Programme, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. His field of research is modern Islam with a focus on the establishment of a modern Muslim public sphere, and the role of the Muslim ulama in modern Arab states. Lately, his research has primarily focused on Islam’s position in the new pan-Arab television networks, and on renewal of the classical Islamic literary genres, such as the fatwa and the khutba. Key publications include: Global Mufti. The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (co-edited with Bettina Gräf, Hurst/CUP 2009), Islam på TV i den arabiske verden (Vandkunsten 2013) og Arab Media Moguls (co-edited with Donatella della Ratta and Naomi Sakr, IB Tauris 2015).