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August 23, 2005
Islam And The Iraqi Constitution
The role of Islam in the new Iraqi Constitution has been the source of much hand-wringing by bloggers--myself included.
But Bill Roggio over at Fourth Rail thinks a little chillin' is in order, at least for now. Bill says that, just as Christianity was an influence on the laws and governments of western nations, so too is it reasonable to expect Islam to have a similar influence on a middle eastern country. Bill:
The real test of Iraq’s commitment to both democratic principles under the influence of Islam will come with the implementation of the constitution by the next elected assembly. But to state an Islamist regime has been created based on the text of the constitution is unfounded. A simple reading of the document will reveal this.
As usual, a crystal ball would be handy.
MORE: An emailer to Rich Lowry makes some more encouraging points:
-- The Afghanistan Constitution contains strong Islam-based provisions, including a blanket provision saying: ‘In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.’ But the Afghan constitution also contains strong human rights protections and is facilitating the emergence of a peaceful and vibrant democracy.
--The Iraq draft appears to be similar. In addition to the broad bill of rights, our translation of the Islam provision states that ‘no law shall be enacted that contradicts [Islam’s] established provisions, the principles of democracy, [or] the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution.’ This is actually a better formulation than Afghanistan’s model.
-- The same provision also protects ‘all the religious rights of all individuals in the freedom of belief and religious practice’ – a provision consistent with international standards and identical to the widely praised Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the interim constitution signed by the Iraq Interim Governing Council in 2004.
-- In addition, Islam is declared to be ‘a’ – not ‘the’– source of legislation, a victory to secularists and roughly in line with the TAL formulation.
--Finally, we are confident that the final interpreters of the Iraqi constitution will be non-religious based courts and the elected legislature – not unelected clerics.
Sorry for the lack of original comment--gotta get my main machine back up and running. Ugh.
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Comments
Yesterday when Shep Smith on Fox was declaring the Iraqi constitution "about as bad as it could be" I had the same thought--is this really SUCH a disaster? I can think of a number of worse situations and certainly some chilling is in order. Nothing's perfect, but this has got to be progress.
Posted by: AcademicElephant at August 23, 2005 01:53 PM
Things seem to be looking better (as of Thursday morning). Maybe that's a shortcoming of the blogosphere: we've got (collectively) a pretty short event horizon. I guess there's a lot of short-term noise, but the trend is usually true.
Posted by: Jeff at August 25, 2005 01:24 AM
