Sonkrai update
So why I haven't I updated the sorta-blog in about two months? A couple of bouts of illness, first a cold, and then a nasty flu that was going around the office that made me take four days off work, left me drained for another week, which meant in the past five weeks or so, I was reduced to writing perhaps a paragraph a night for most of the time that I wasn't ill. But at the same time I did get even that little done when I could and thus I am on track to finish the book by early April.I have had to take two weeks of annual leave to get it done, but the final manuscript should be on its way to the publisher by April 8 at the latest.
Blogged
A blog search turned up a link to a backgrounder I wrote in 2003 for CBC.ca on the changing demographics and the politics of Iran, called Iran Facing A Demographic Revolution. (It's since been updated by our research staff). The backgrounder was cited by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad at a conference in Washington in May, 2004 in a paper called "The Challenge of Institutional Governance in Islam: Justice, Democracy and Shariah". (PDF file will open in a new window).
Ahmad, who teaches at the University of Maryland, is also president and director of The Minaret Institute of Freedom, which says on its website that it is dedicated to "educate Muslims on the importance of liberty and free markets to a good society..."
The most fascinating thing that I found about Ahmad's paper was his idea that the very basis of Western democracy, Magna Carta, was, in fact, influenced by returning Crusaders who saw that the man who would expel most of them from the region, Saladin (spelled Salahuddin in the paper)was a Islamic ruler who was not above the law. He goes on to say, "The British barons demanded that [King] John submit, not to Islamic law, but to a
notion of an English traditional law that they imagined but until that moment had never
been explicit."
I found out about this when a search turned up a copy of the paper on the Kashkul blog.
10:22 AM posted by Robin Rowland
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