Search Results

This chapter explains the history of the Islamic milieu, and describes its changing relationship to Dahiya and a new generation of pious Shi'i Muslims. This history will provide an understanding of how political contingency, urbanization, economic mobility, and generational shifts have combined to produce an environment ripe for the development of leisure. It also considers transnational influences on leisure, and a general sense of the infitah, or “opening up,” of Hizbullah and Dahiya as conditions for these new leisure desires and sites. The most visible of these changes is of course Hizbullah's popularity along with its incorporation into the social and spatial fabric of Dahiya and Lebanon.

How do Islamic law states prefer to resolve their international disputes? Is it possible to identify general patterns that apply to all these states? Why are only some Islamic law states open to using international courts in attempting to solve their interstate disputes? A common Western attitude toward Islam has often served to create the assumption of a massive dichotomy between the Islamic legal tradition and international law across the entire Islamic milieu, projecting a continuing divergence between the two legal systems. Chapter 1 discusses the importance of understanding the Islamic milieu’s preferences with respect to international conflict management venues. It presents a short version of the Islamic theory of peaceful resolution (fully presented later in chapter 4) and discusses the broader significance of the project, locating it within the broader scholarly literature of interstate dispute resolution.

This chapter summarizes the main arguments and the main empirical findings, stressing the timeliness of insights gained through this inquiry. It situates this research in the broader international law and political science literature, discussing the implications for policymakers. However disconcerting the dissonance between the Islamic legal tradition and international law may appear, there are more similarities between these two legal systems than the policy world and the scholarship take into account. The chapter discusses the importance of Islamic education in shaping states’ preferences vis-à-vis international conflict management. The inherent diversity of the Islamic milieu cannot be overlooked. International dispute resolution is what states make of it and it is up to them to define these mechanisms. In an important way, international law constitutes a broad enough framework to grant ILS space to tailor conflict management venues to their own needs and preferences, as dictated by their domestic legal systems.