ry (e.g., Egypt's Nasser). In either case, however, their concern was to apply Western techniques in the pursuit of nationalist goals; the furthest thing from their minds was to look back to the institutions and practices of the pre Western past which, in their minds, had produced the very weakness that left their societies open to Western exploitation.
Moreover, even if they had chosen to look to the Islamic past, they would have found very little to guide them in the areas of criminal justice and penology. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Islamic judicial tradition was minimally concerned with questions of criminal law and penology. The Qu'ran did, indeed, contain a few "canonical" punishments such as death by stoning for adulterers that were applied in the earliest Islamic community to specific crimes, along with some (quite strict) standards of evidence in criminal proceedings and a requirement for speedy trial. In later Islamic times, however, criminal justice had been almost entirely in the hands of arbit
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