The reception of Western rational, bureaucratic law and the corresponding institutions of the corporate, Weberian state into Muslim nations has not been a particularly successful experience. Unlike most non-Muslim Asian nations, notably Japan, China and Korea, Muslim nations have found it exceedingly difficult to reconcile the legal and governance notions they had inherited from their own history with the demands of modern Western public law. The reception has been haphazard, uneven and fraught with an enduring normative and cognitive resistance to its logical strictures, due to the desire to maintain an ‘authentic,’ distinctly Islamic social model.

This nostalgia notwithstanding, the competitive pressures of an increasingly integrated international system have since the 19th century led to the wholescale disintegration of traditional Islamic legal institutions in both the teaching, making and application of law. But the adoption of Western models –through both colonial coercion but also deliberate choice – has been accompanied by intense and ongoing debates about the manner in which the ‘sacred law’ of Islam could or should play a role in the modern constitutional and bureaucratic edifice of the state.