[...]... the basis of the new one, and negotiations within the Loya Jirga which reflected the ethno-linguistic alignments as much as the pre-Taliban struggle of the Islamic Mujahedin against the Soviet Union The process is traced in detail in the chapter by Barnett Rubin Rubin analyses the threeway contention between the new government and ruling coalition, the former Mujahedin and international bodies in the. .. to the more inclusive but slower Round Table model favored by the UN, doomed the prospects for constitutional state-building and facilitated the disintegration of Iraq The final collapse of the consensual process of constitution-making involving the Sunnis, the American insistence that the Iraqis not avail themselves of the six-month extension allowed by the TAL, the putting of the draft to vote in. .. constitutionmaking, we should not ignore variations within this wave in Eastern and Central Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Africa Central and Eastern Europe have been the trendsetters in this wave of constitution-making, and they have been the focus of attention in the literature Africa and the Middle East, however, have not received much attention The purpose of the essays in this volume, and of the. .. pay the military, which supported the king and protected the realm This ideology reflected the social structure of the Middle East and the relationships among different social groups, while assigning to those in power the responsibility for maintaining a just equilibrium within the system The model of Muhammad and the early caliphs is a model (or several models) for choosing the right ruler, on the. .. between the ideology of the Circle and the historical relations and institutions that seem most pertinent to modern concerns about constitutional reconstruction in the Middle East It culminates by discussing the development of constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of traditional Middle Eastern political discourse couched in terms of the Circle to a modern discourse couched in Western... purpose of the essays in this volume, and of the Workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law at which they were first presented in April 2005, is to remedy the situation with regard to the Middle East It goes without saying that the most hotly debated subject in the constitutional politics of the Middle East is the vexing relation between Islam and democracy This relation is very... seek to remedy the lack of attention to the historical background of the current constitutional crisis in the Muslim world Linda Darling analyses the fundamental idea of justice as the underlying principle of government in pre-modern Middle Eastern monarchies She shows that the Middle Eastern conception of the circle of justice, as the core of political ethic and basic norm of statecraft, indeed predates... constitution The impact of Islam on constitutionalism with the late coming of the age of ideology in the Middle East was radically different from the first, and far more destructive In this wave of ideological constitution-making, Islam increasingly appears as the basis of the constitution and the state rather than a limitation to them This makes current constitutional problems especially intractable... examples from the Middle East to demonstrate how very remote are the current theories of constitution-making, both the liberal/Rawlsian and the rational choice variants, from the reality of constitutional bargaining and process Nor does he find the local political traditions any better than these rarefied constitutionalist theories in giving a firmer ground for the critical role of partisan interests and... control fertility by bringing rain.5 A poem by the caliph al-Walid II put his own accession in a similar light: The shrewd and evilbringing one is dead; the rain is already falling.6 Divine support, military victory, protective care, justice and the prosperity of the land were all ascribed to the Umayyads The later Umayyad rulers themselves shared the poets view of the caliphate as having the qualities and . the place of Islam in the constitutional order of con- temporary Middle East would be incomplete without an investigation of the problem of defining the. impact on the making of these constitutions. The debate on the constitutional implications of Islam contributed to the long delay in the making of the 1956