ABSTRACT
Today, the effects of globalization, the enmeshment of world-wide economies, the massive movements of population across the globe, including the growth in Europe of its non-Christian populace, have all led to a questioning of conventional understandings in the social and historical sciences, political thought, religious studies, literature, and law. In the latter field, this has found expression in the growing debate over legal pluralism (De Sousa Santos, 1987; Tamanaha, 1993, 2000; Teubner, 1991–1992), that is, in a growing recognition that the centrism characterizing the legal order of the State was not as unproblematic as it was once thought to be. With the growth of the nation-state during the nineteenth century, and with the extension of its power and hegemony over ever more arenas of human action and interaction, the law of the State came to be seen as the only source of legally valid normative orders. The legal system of the State attained its apogee in the formulations of positivistic legal thought, procedural in nature, which made nary a claim to transcendent, revelatory or otherwise other-worldly or ultimate sources of their authority.
