Islamic constitutionalism and rule of law: a constitutional economics perspective

Note that constitutionalism can exist without a constitution and a constitution does not necessarily result in constitutionalism. For the former notion, Gordon (1999, p. 5) asserts that if constitutionalism is defined in terms of written constitutions embodying specific constraints and provisions such as the Bill of Rights in the US constitution, countries with no written constitution such as Israel, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom are automatically excluded. Nevertheless, these countries are not less “constitutional” than the United States. For the notion of a state with a constitution but with no constitutionalism, Sartori (1962, p. 861) argues that constitutions without constitutionalism are “façade constitutions” in the sense that such constitutions can declare inspiring principles and adopt specific power structures for government; but these provisions and principles are ineffective and potentially delegitimized because they are not actually followed. Zhang (2010, p. 950) presents China as an example of a constitutional state without constitutionalism. Zhang (2010, p. 951) states that “China’s Constitution lacks any meaningful mechanism of implementation, and is left unguarded against official violations; it declares a long list of good ideals without the capacity to fulfill any; one can easily find unfulfilled promises and positive violations of constitutional norms in daily life.”

See Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002, 2005a, b), Easterly and Levine (2003), Rodrik et al. (2004).

The causal relation between constitutionalism and rule of law is still a matter of dispute in the literature. For example, Chahil and Singh (2003, p. 18) state that rule of law is a “device used to achieve constitutionalism.” This direction of causality contradicts that found by Rodriguez et al. (2010, p. 1475), who view constitutionalism as a “key rule of law institution.” Nevertheless, generally, definitions of rule of law largely correspond with the concept of constitutionalism. In fact, it can be argued that the concepts of rule of law and constitutionalism are so closely related that they can almost be used interchangeably (Voigt 1998, p. 196; Chen 1999–2000, p. 149).

Schulze (1995) tells what happened after the Islamic constitution was introduced: “the [IRA]-proposal was not discussed openly. The [IRA]-session of 1979 could not be held, as most participants from the duwal ar-rafd, i.e., from those states, which rejected the Egyptian Israeli peace treaty of 1978, were not allowed to travel to Cairo. Again, divergent political views prevented the jurists from defining a legal conception of the Muslim nation (Umma). The main problem, of course, was to what extent an Islamic constitution should be the legal framework of the Umma; mostly it was postulated that an Islamic constitution should be the model of nation-state constitutions. It should prescribe an Islamic form of government and jurisdiction without questioning the sovereignty of the nation-states” Schulze (1995, pp. 180–181).

Elias Saba and Thomas Levi Thompson provide an English translation on the Tahrir Documents website, but there are some problems with and omissions from their version. Therefore, I re-translated Al-Azhar constitution from the Arabic source. The original Arabic source along with a complete English translation can be found at: https://​sites.​google.​com/​site/​moamengoudaecon/​al-azhar-s-islamic-constitution.

See Arjomand (2007), Abou El Fadl (2004), Moussalli (2003), Grote and Röder (2011), Hashemi (2012).