The Qur'an and the Constitution
The Quran and the Constitution are mutually supportive supreme texts; one does not negate the other. Numerous forms of government, cultural traditions, and economic systems are compatible with both supreme texts. Muslim nations are free to promulgate specific constitutions that reflect their social, political, and economic preferences rooted in history and culture. The specific constitution must reflect the conscience of the nation, for constitutions that fail to do so are vulnerable to amendment, even revolutionary replacement. Because the human condition is constantly evolving, the Quran, though a permanent divine text immune to alteration or amendment, is amenable to the evolutionary calls of believers. Each generation of Muslims is free to understand the Quran for meeting its needs. Interpreters as believers, however, summon the luminosity of faith while analyzing the Word of God and refrain from deforming the meaning of the divine text. They should not project personal agendas into the meaning of the Quran as do some interpreters of the Constitution.
The Is and the Ought of International Constitutionalism: How Far Have We Come on Habermas's Road to a “Well-Considered Constitutionalization of International Law”?
In recent years, a growing chorus of publicists – lawyers, philosophers, political scientists and others – has discussed and often advocated the “constitutionalization” of international law, i.e. the gradual transformation of the whole or at least parts of international law into a world constitution. These “constitutionalists,” many of them having a German background, point to various recent phenomena such as international legal norms with erga omnes effects and peremptory norms (jus cogens) which seem to establish a hierarchical order of global values, going far beyond the classical inter-State relationships of coexistence and synallagmatic exchange. They further list compulsory judicial or quasi-judicial dispute settlement mechanisms (e.g., in the WTO). The constitutionalists put particular emphasis on the human rights revolution since 1945 and the rise of international criminal law that is administered by various international criminal tribunals – phenomena which have transformed individuals into (partial) subjects of international law alongside the states.
‘The Divided West’: International Lawyers in Europe and America
It is well known that signifi cant differences exist in international law scholarship between the United States and Europe. Even when they share a positive outlook on the role and future of international law - as Philippe Sands and Anne-Marie Slaughter do - the intellectual approach and analytical style of European and American international lawyers often vary considerably. A complex and fascinating intellectual history lies behind these differences. Its main chapters are the emergence on the two sides of the Atlantic of different assumptions about sovereignty in the modern world; the role of science in legal argument and the relationship between the actual and the normative, areas of thought shaped in the United States by the philosophy of pragmatism which had a marginal infl uence in Europe; and the deep-seated rule-scepticism that defi nes much American thinking about the law but is not for the most part a feature of the European approach to the law in general and to international law in particular. Subject to the necessary cautions and disclaimers which must accompany any refl ection on general trends in two large and heterogeneous intellectual communities, this analysis seeks to draw attention to these trends as illustrated in the recent work of Sands and Slaughter.