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.

Coupled with the failure of explicitly Western state models of both the left and the right to deliver decent governance, the rise of political Islam has further strengthened popular and elite attachment to Islamic law. Valued as the repository and focus of identity, derived not least from its historical role a language of both justice and refusal, demands for Islamic law have a strong, and growing, presence throughout Muslim-majority societies.