NEWS: Iraq Constitution May Erode Last Justification for War

But you don't knoooooooooowwwwwwww that .....

you are right it's all in how well they follow it. As I said before there are places with good constitutions that ignore them all together and places with no constitution that do just fine without them. So this constitution by itself doesn't nessesaraly mean anything one way or the other. I also am a bit sadened by the idea if it's not doen the way "we" would do it then it must be wrong. To me that is how most of these comments come across. There seems to be a prejudgist against islamic people in that they can't have democracy and their religion at the same time. I don't think this is true.

I think that there is more than a little misunderstanding of what shira is. It does contain religios rules like dietary restictions and others. What it also is is a history of the law for islamic countries having little to do with religion directly. British commen law is rather similar if you leave out some of the behavoral law. Different people view it in different ways and alot of the "laws" are just guidlines that you should live your life by without penalty if you violate those "laws".

Sharia (Arabic: شريعة; also Sharī'ah, Shari'a, Shariah or Syariah) is the Arabic word for Islamic law, also known as the Law of Allah. Islam classically draws no distinction between religious and secular life. Hence Sharia covers not only religious rituals, but many aspects of day-to-day life. However, this traditional view of religious law is opposed by some modern liberal movements within Islam. The term itself refers to "way to water" or a "break in a riverbank allowing access to water." Islamic scholars for the most part distinguished between fiqh, which means 'understanding' and refers to the inferences drawn by scholars from the sources of law, and sharia, which is the moral ideals that lie behind the fiqh. Scholars hope that fiqh and sharia are in a particular case identical, but they cannot be sure. What is certain is that if one acts on legitimately derived fiqh, one is exempt from sanction.

The sharia as dictated by Islamic lawmakers is believed by Muslims to be merely a human approximation of Sharia, which is the divine and eternal correct path. In creating sharia Islamic lawmakers are not, therefore, actually creating correct or incorrect actions, but rather attempting to interpret divine will.

For Sunni Muslims, the sources of Islamic law are the Qur'an and the Hadith, but ijma, the consensus of the community, was also accepted as a minor source. Qiyas — various forms of reasoning, including by analogy — are used by the law scholars (Mujtahidun) to deal with situations where the sources provided no concrete rules.

In Imami-Shi'i law, the sources of law (usul al-fiqh) are the Qur'an, anecdotes of the Prophet's practices and those of the 12 Imams, and the intellect (aql). The practices called Sharia today, however, also have roots in local customs (Al-urf).





Wikipedia