Saudi Arabia Law

This brief vignette of Saudi penal law in operation serves to illustrate the most fundamental characteristics of the Saudi Arabian legal and justice system: its traditionalism, and its complete distinction in methodology and what may be called style from justice procedures elsewhere. In most of the world, including the nonwestern world, legal and penal procedures are distinctively of Western origin. These sometimes follow broadly AngloAmerican procedures; more often, they are derived from the European "civil law"  ultimately Roman  tradition. Usually they are based on the procedures of a former colonial power; sometimes (as in Turkey or Japan) they were adopted as deliberate reforms by modernizing leaders or movements. More broadly, the world has largely adopted not only westernstyle machinery, but a western and secular concept of the purpose of law as primarily the practical regulation of worldly affairs. The underlying Saudi assumption is quite different, that law is a God

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parishioners appear or fail to appear in substantial numbers. In Islamic tradition, this libertarian practice applied to the role of judge, qadi. No sharp distinction was made between judges and "arbiters;" a qadi might be agreed to by parties to a dispute, and he would first seek to settle the affair by consent before issuing a fatwa, or religious opinion. The legal corpus of Islam thus consists of three parts. At the highest level are the specific provisions of the Koran itself. A level below these are legal practices or concepts based on hadith, "tradition" or "report;" accounts of actions taken by Muhammad or other early Muslim leaders. Finally, there is a body of accepted fatwas, embodying a sort of case law. In the early, united period of the Islamic world, the caliph (Khalifah, "commander of the faithful") was leader both of the state and the 'ulama. After the fragmentation of the Caliphate in the Middle Ages, the legal system evolved with a startling independence of local government. Local amirs had their executive enforcement officers, and could and would exercise arbitrary power without recourse to law. But if an amir wished an act to be generally accepted as legitimate, it had to be
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Approximate Word count = 3605
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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