Abduh An-Na'im v. Noah Feldman: No Contest, IMHO

And not because Abduh is my colleague!

USNews

Why Islamic States Would Be Bad for Muslims

Two scholars, despite their differences, say that defining 'sharia' is crucial to finding a healthy place for religion in Muslim nations

By Jay Tolson

Posted May 1, 2008

Maybe it's an only-in-America sort of irony: A prominent scholar who happens to be Jewish makes the case for more Islamic sharia law in Muslim-majority states, while another distinguished legal scholar, a devout Muslim, argues that the best thing for those states, and for sharia, is to keep them separate.

But beyond the little irony, there is much at stake in the difference of opinion that emerges from their respective books: Noah Feldman's The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State and Abdullah Ahmed An-Na'im's Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a. That difference is of such crucial importance, in fact, that its wise resolution should be of great concern to all who claim to be interested in the cause of promoting democracy in the predominantly Muslim parts of the world.

Both authors are distinguished scholars in their field. Feldman, a prolific writer (What We Owe Iraq, Divided by God) and professor at Harvard Law School, served as an adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council when it was drafting an interim constitution for the post-Saddam Hussein state. He once notably testified before a U.S. Senate committee that efforts to keep sharia entirely out of Iraq's Constitution would probably guarantee that Iraq would have no constitution at all.

An-Na'im's credentials are equally impressive. A professor of law at Emory University, he was a prominent voice in the Islamic reform movement in his native Sudan until the growing political power of religious fundamentalists forced him out of the country in 1985. At Emory and in his earlier work at Human Rights Watch, An-Na'im has devoted himself to reviving and advancing methods of interpreting sharia to reveal what he believes is its basic consistency with international standards of human rights....

An-Na'im's book goes more deeply into the meaning of sharia than does Feldman's. And even though Feldman's book has a different focus, its somewhat cursory treatment of the question raises concerns about his thoughts on the desirability and even the possibility of Islamic states. Na'im's closer examination strengthens his argument that in our times, secular states—and certainly not Islamic states—provide the only political conditions under which Muslims can truly live in accordance with sharia.

[Read the rest, in USNews.]