e practice in police procedure, courtrooms, and the philosophy and application of criminal punishment.
Even after direct Western domination began to recede, Western influence remained paramount in the criminal justice systems of the Islamic world. The first generation of post colonial leaders were, overwhelming, "modernizers." Their orientation might be "bourgeoise," or it might be socialist revolutionary. 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 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 arbitrary governmental authorities. These authorities tended for the most part to reject Sharia procedures (and punishments) as too mild for the practical conditions of authoritarian government in the pre Modern age.
Thus, the development of Sharia law was confined largely to what a modern American jurist would call civil law. The Sharia was the law of the marketplace and of the middle class, a tool for the independent settling of disputes in cases in which the government's police authority was not called upon. Even the system of cadis, or Islamic judges, was a ...