Toobaa

"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

"The extraordinary capacity of Islam to generate a language of justice also helps explain its great value to people seeking to resist governments that are plainly unjust." --- Noah Feldman, Harvard Professor of Law, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State

"If one notices that, for thirteen hundred years, Islam provided the dominant language of politics in the Middle East, and if one treats the twentieth century as a brief aberration, [... t]hen the reemergence of Islam looks like a return to the norm, and the rise of secular nationalism looks like the historical phenomenon in need of special explanation." --- Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton)

Noah Feldman, Harvard University Law Professor