Modern Islamic International Law between Accommodation and Resistance: The Case of Israel and BDS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most scholarship on modern Islamic conceptions of international law and global peace emphasize two diametrically opposed trends. The first amounts to an accommodationist view of Islamic law, whereby it abandons Islamically distinctive doctrines such as jihad in order for Muslim states to live peaceably in the post-World War II global community. The second amounts to a rejectionist view, whereby Islamic law continues to adhere to classical views on world order developed in the first centuries of Islam during the heyday of Islamic imperial expansionism, and rejects the legitimacy of contemporary international law. Most scholarship dismiss the second trend and asserts the triumph of the first. Yet, even among the contemporary Muslim jurists who most categorically endorse modern international law and the United Nations, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the State of Israel presents a conceptual conundrum. Given Muslims’ universal rejection of its legitimacy, even accommodationist jurists such as Qaradawi continue to refer to Israel as part of the dar al-harb – a territory of war – and not part of global community living on the basis of peaceful relations. Yet, applying the category of dar al-harb, even to Israel, is incoherent when other commitments, such as the commitments to the UN system, are taken into account. Using the framework of international law developed by the Egyptian jurist `Abd al-Raziq al-Sanhuri, I argue that Sanhuri’s conception of a modern, rules-based international order, provides a properly Islamic response to the challenge of states that formally profess adherence to international norms, but systematically breach them. Because such states recognize the law, they are not outside of the law, and accordingly, cannot be deemed to be part of a territory of war. Rather, such states are internal to a league of states legally at peace with another, but are law-breakers, and in extreme cases, their violations of law may be criminal. From the perspective of modern Islamic international law, the law-abiding members of the international community have a duty to restrain the law-breaking member. If they fail to do so, drawing on Islamic law principles governing the duty to refrain from transacting with a known criminal, the paper argues that boycott by civil society is the remedy that must be pursued against a law-breaking state when the law-abiding states of the world community are unwilling or unable to check its transgressions. From this perspective, the Boycott, Divest and Sanction Movement that resists continued Israeli colonization of Palestine can serve as exemplary case study in the development of modern Islamic international law’s responses to international lawlessness that goes unremedied.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".