Narrative, Deconstruction, and Counter-terrorism

My colleagues at the strategy, national security, and military affairs journal The Bridge published my review today of some recent works by Ajit Maan, who brings a background in post-structuralist literary theory to her work in counter-terrorism. The post includes an extended close analysis of a recent ISIS video to highlight the care Daesh takes in producing and editing its propaganda (warning: the video is very graphic). Maan’s work points the way toward how high-level literary theory can help guide the use of “soft power” on behalf of democratic, post-colonial, and multi-cultural ideals—a fascinating and important blend of the philosophical and the practical.

 

Islamic Law and the State

Today I had the chance to read a fascinating essay titled “The Political Failure of Islamic Law,” by Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton (who admits from the start that his title is “deliberately provocative and somewhat misleading”). The essay is based on a lecture he gave at Yale Law School, and it’s the most recent edition in the law school’s Occasional Papers series.

Haykel argues that the modern Sunni Reform movement and its Islamist followers have “failed to achieve the political vision of a powerful and confident Islamic order” because of their statist vision.

The Reformer’s program, writes Haykel, “represents a double rupture from the past: first, the Reformers deliberately chose to sweep away the teachings of the established schools of law; second, they opted for the state rather than society as the means by which to impose their program.”

Notably, among the consequences of the writings of Reformist scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) were a rejection of “the epistemology of traditional legal rulings, most of which had been built by a process of analogical reasoning”—much, one might say, like the rules of the English common law—and the replacement of premodern legal principles with “concepts of public welfare (maslaha) and the ‘purposes of law’ (maqasid al-sharia‘a).”

“Very few are the voices of opposition to this state-centered vision,” concludes Haykel. “One of them is the Lebanese intellectual and scholar Ridwan al-Sayyid. Al-Sayyid … argues that for centuries Islamic beliefs and practices were determined by the community (jama‘a) and not by the state. The meaning of Islam was explicated by the societies in which the jurists lived and developed their views. And because it was a societal and collective enterprise, it was open to a multiplicity of views and to a degree of tolerance for difference. For al-Sayyid, the great danger today lies in giving the state, with narrow-minded Islamists at its helm, the exclusive right to determine the content and contours of Islamic law.”

Do Haykel’s arguments point to another untapped connection between the Islamic and Anglo-American legal and political traditions?

Muslims, Christians and Legal Bargaining

ack to the Getty’s images from the Vidal Mayor, the great thirteenth-century redaction of Aragonese law.

The manuscript emerges from a critical moment in the relation between Christianity and Islam, the Spanish Reconquista—the gradual capture by Christian crusaders of Muslim Iberia, the caliphate of al-Andalus.

This moment plays a vital role in the ideology of Al Qaeda and its Salafi-jihadist affiliates. Osama bin Laden spoke repeatedly of the “tragedy of al-Andalus,” and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb frequently refers to Muslim Spain in its messaging (for more detail, see this succinct article from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point).

The political imagination of Al Qaeda and company, that is, is fueled by the historical memory of the larger time and place in which Bishop Vidal de Cañellas made his great legal redaction for King James I of Aragon.

In my previous post, I noted that the charters, or fueros, that the Vidal Mayor incorporates were part of a process in which Iberian royals attracted Christian settlement within the peninsula by offering various legal privileges. They used fueros much like Delaware today uses its laws of incorporation—as an enticement.

If you’re a king and want to attract merchants to a town, what do you do? Provide its inhabitants with especially strong protections of their private property and announce that henceforth they’re exempt from certain taxes. In the meantime, put an end to the violence of clan feuds, which are detrimental to commerce.

Want to draw nobles to a frontier where they may have to fight Muslim forced by horseback?  Provide them with legal exemptions from their usual mandatory military service.

“O Valencia!” Oh, Aragon! Oh, 1247!

 received an email yesterday that caused me to lean back from my desk, look up, and audibly whisper “oh, wow, now that’s just incredibly cool.”

The message brought word of a new digital program by the J. Paul Getty Trust called “open content.” In the words of a press release of August 12, the goal of the program is “to share, freely and without restriction, as many of the Getty’s digital resources as possible” (emphasis added, with joy). The press release continues:

The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. Today we’ve taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum’s collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose. These are high-resolution, reproduction-quality images with embedded metadata, some over 100 megabytes in size.

If the idea of free, unrestricted, high-res, metadata-rich images of great art touches a chord deep inside you, I hope you’ll join me for a moment in jumping up and down in glee.

Naturally, I immediately had to check out the search gateway and start browsing—in particular, to look for images with legal themes. And I found some great ones.

Today, I’ve been captivated by images from an illuminated medieval manuscript called the Vidal Mayor. This beauty has nothing to do with mayors or with anyone named Sassoon. Instead, it’s the essential redaction of laws of thirteenth-century Aragon—and before this admittedly just somewhat obscure idea causes anyone click “back” on their browser, let me share what this means.

“Disgraced” and the Law

Two weeks ago, as the first chill of fall was descending on New England, I caught the train to Manhattan and strolled happily to Lincoln Center. One reason I was happy is that along the way I was able to stuff my briefcase full of truffles at the first chocolate store I could find. But I also knew I was going to watch some excellent theater.

I have been thinking about the experience ever since.

The play was “Disgraced,” by Ayad Akhtar, and this new production was held in the Claire Tow Theater, an experimental stage whose well-appointed intimacy is ideally suited to exhibit the dramatic kinesis and collision of the play’s four characters. The actors seem so close that they might as well reach into your chest directly as they rip out your heart (which, by the end of a taut ninety minutes, believe me they do).

Perhaps I feel so passionately about the play because of the friends with whom I saw it. The group included a religiously devout Muslim military officer from a major nation in the Middle East. He had never before seen a play—this was his first experience of theater, ever. When I looked at him as the lights came up, I had a profound understanding of the meaning of the word “catharsis” and a renewed appreciation of the power of art.

A New Video: Bedouin Law

Greetings to everyone after a somewhat longer absence than I had planned! The second pass proofs of The Rule of the Clan are now with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and a kind and sympathetic soul in New York is carefully creating the index. It’s good to be back.

I was so pleased with the reception of my first small documentary video that I decided to make another—and here it is. It’s about the law of the Bedouin, the independent Arab nomads of the Middle East and North Africa.

Although I have yet to acquire serious video-editing software and I’m operating entirely without a sound editor, the production values of this video are greatly improved thanks to a new camera, a Lumix DMC-GH2. I really appreciate everyone who gave me such great advice about the purchase, especially my former students and my friends at the Minnesota Historical Society. On the post-production front, I’m also now using a monitor that’s nearly as large as the heart of the good man who gave it to me, Deven Desai, who blogs at Concurring Opinions.

The video is called “A Law of Honor and Contract,” and it’s centered around a conversation I had in Manhattan with my friend Frank, one of the leading Western authorities on Bedouin law. One way to appreciate the depth of Frank’s expertise is to know that his answers to my questions were entirely off the cuff—no preparation, just unscripted brilliance.

Of Mexico, Blasphemy, and the “Feel-Clash” of Legal Difference

Last week I attended an exciting talk by the journalist David Lida, who for over twenty years has documented everyday life in Mexico, particularly Mexico City, in ways few other writers are able to do (because Lida has both great compassion and serious nerve). During the event, Lida read from the manuscript of a semi-autobiographical novel, and an episode he recounted nicely illuminates an issue I’ll be examining centrally on Worlds of Law.

In addition to his career as a writer, Lida has an unusual side job. He works as a “mitigation specialist” for attorneys representing Mexicans in the United States who are facing the death penalty. What this means, in essence, is that he unearths the back-story of people who have been accused or convicted of capital murder to help persuade courts to show them leniency—if a sentence of life without the possibility of parole be can called lenient. In practice, the job requires Lida to travel to humble, sometimes dangerous places and persuade strangers to reveal intimate details about other people’s lives: about their friends, parishioners, cousins, brothers, and sons. He then stitches those fading snapshots together into a narrative for American defense lawyers.

It is work that requires moral and physical bravery, a surplus of “negative capability,” and a skilled pen.