"To Westerners, and even to those Muslims educated under Western-influenced conditions, it may sound extremely strange to describe the classical Islamic state of the Ottoman Empire and the many dynasties that preceded it as fundamentally legal. Western writers have for centuries gone to great lengths to describe the Muslim world as the home of Oriental despots who did what they would, free from the constraints supposedly imposed on Western rulers. In fact, many of the most enlightened, law-loving, Western thinkers - Montesquieu is one famous example - used the example of the Islamic East as a literary device for projecting their vision of the worst possible non-legal regime. For the most part, they did this not out of hatred or spite, but simply because every good political allegory needs a contrast between a utopia and a dystopia." --- Noah Feldman, The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State