I’m delighted to report that last month Brill released a new book by a great friend of the Mattone Center (and mine!) for many years, Professor Andrea Pin. Andrea, who teaches law at the University of Padua, has an encyclopedic knowledge of comparative law, especially the comparative law of church and state, and he has devoted much of his career to studying how law and religion interact in the Middle East. His new book, Religious Freedom without the Rule of Law: The Constitutional Odysseys of Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq and the Fate of the Middle East, addresses that interaction. Highly recommended! Here is the description from the publisher’s website:

The volume compares the efforts to instil the values and practices of the rule of law in the Middle East in the early twenty-first century with their disappointing performances in terms of safety, human rights, and, especially, religious freedom. It zooms in on Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq to argue that international interventions and local initiatives underestimated the ethno-religious mosaic of these countries and their political and constitutional culture.

The standard notion of the rule of law values individualism, equality, rights, and courts, which hardly fit the makeup of the Middle East. Securing stability and protecting religious freedom in the region requires compromising on the rule of law; the consociational model of constitutionalism would have better chances of achieving them.