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, primarily 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 presentation seeks to investigate the particular benefits for applying to the research and instruction of the ‘sacred law’ of Islam (as Weber would have it) the methodological rigour and tools of critical analysis derived from positivist corporatist law.