Asma Uddin

Are laws the products of change or producers of change? It is interesting to note the relevance of this question in light of the efforts at legally enacted social change in Turkey and Pakistan. In Turkey, the dominant elite has adopted, wholesale, various Western legal codes in an effort to secularize its legal system and bring about positive human rights change. In Pakistan, the movement is toward greater “Islamization” of laws deemed “secular” by the controlling religious institutions. Like the failure of Turkey’s legal secularization, Pakistan’s attempted Islamization, in light of blatantly un-Islamic human rights violations and the pervasive role of extra-Islamic customs, is similarly ineffective. That is to say, although the purported trends in the two countries are dissimilar — Turkey wanting to secularize and Pakistan wanting to Islamize — if the purpose of secularization and Islamization is to grant basic humans rights to the country’s citizens despite traditional pulls against the granting of such rights, the countries’ aims are in fact parallel and the same analysis of effectuality can be applied to both.

As Turkey and Pakistan struggle to define the relationship between tradition and their respective legal systems, it is helpful to look at examples of how other countries dealt with the question successfully in light of their own traditions. For example, the issue of law’s role in shaping social biases was central to America’s seminal equal protection case, Plessy v. Ferguson. This case has had a strong influence on scholarly understanding in America of how law defines and actualizes equality. As such, in a limited sense, Plessy and subsequent commentary on the case can help set up a useful intellectual framework within which one can analyze the struggle for equality in Muslim countries.