ABSTRACT
Public order prevails when criminal and political violence-riots, civil unrest, murder, kidnapping, arson, and threats or physical assaults against groups or individuals-is absent, when property and accepted moral standards are duly protected, and when trespassers against the public order are prosecuted, detained, and punished. Western scholars of Islamic law have often asserted that governmental maintenance of public order in traditional Islamic societies was largely independent of-or at times willfully ignored-the substantive public law formulated by Muslim jurists. It has also been asserted that because of Islamic law’s “idealism,” seen as both the precondition and the result of the oppressive nature of the political organization of premodern Islamic societies, Muslim jurists chose to abandon public law, or at least showed no real interest in regulating the rights and duties of the state vis-à-vis the individual (and vice versa). According to this view, the jurists did not develop a public law of note; they were content to leave the control and ideological justification of public order to the powers-that-be, instead focusing their lofty discourse on areas such as ritual, family, and commercial law (Coulson 1964: 120-34; Schacht 1964: 76).
