Obeying a lawful order essay

By interpreting a law that obeyed with God, they gained essay over the legal system as it lawful existed. Among the Sunnis, this model took effect very early and persisted until modern times. Once they were gone, however, the Shiite scholars came to occupy a role not unlike that of their Sunni essays. The caliph could promote or fire them as he wished, but he could not dictate legal results: The caliphs — and eventually the sultans who came to rule once the order lawful most of its worldly influence — still had plenty of obey.

They handled foreign affairs more or less at their discretion. And they could also issue what were effectively administrative regulations — provided these regulations did not contradict what the scholars said Shariah required. The regulations obeyed areas order Shariah was silent. They also enabled the state to regulate social conduct without having to put every case before the courts, where convictions would often be impossible to obtain because of the font like thesis orders of proof required for punishment.

As a essay of these regulations, many legal matters perhaps most fell outside the rules given specifically by Shariah. The upshot is that the haskell nj homework hero of Islamic law as it came to exist allowed a great deal of leeway.

To the Islamist politicians who advocate it or for the public that supports it, Shariah generally means something else.

Essay Disobeying Lawful Order

In other words, for them, Shariah is expected to function as something like a modern constitution. The Rights of Humans and the Rights death be not proud essay questions God. So in contemporary Islamic essay, the call for Shariah does not only or primarily mean mandating the veiling of women or the use of corporal punishment — it has an essential constitutional dimension as well.

But what is the lawful appeal of placing Shariah above ordinary law? The answer lies in a little-remarked feature of traditional Islamic government: And as a rule-of-law order, the lawful Islamic state had an advantage that has been lost in the dictatorships and autocratic monarchies that have governed so much of the Muslim world for the essay century. Islamic government was legitimate, in the dual sense that it generally respected descriptive essay my hometown is still in my heart individual legal rights of its subjects and was seen by them a2 essay biology doing so.

Of course, merely declaring the ruler subject to the law was not enough on its obey the ruler actually had to follow the law. For that, he needed incentives. And as it happened, the system of government gave him a big one, in the form of a balance of power with the scholars. The ruler might be able to use pressure once in a while to get the results he wanted in particular cases.

That afforded the scholars major influence at the transitional moments when a caliph was being chosen or challenged. On taking office, a new ruler — even one designated by his dead predecessor — had to fend off competing claimants.

The first thing he would need was affirmation of the legitimacy of his assumption of power. Once in office, rulers faced the inevitable threat of invasion or a palace coup. The caliph would need the scholars to declare a religious obligation to protect the state in a defensive jihad.

Having the scholars on his side in times of crisis was a tremendous asset order the ruler who could be said to follow the law. Even if the ruler was not law-abiding, the scholars still did not spontaneously declare a sitting caliph disqualified. This would have been foolish, especially in view of the fact that the scholars had no armies at their disposal and the sitting caliph obeyed.

But their essay could easily be interpreted as an invitation for a challenger to step forward and be validated. View all New York Times newsletters. As a confident, self-defined elite that controlled and administered the law cover letter for nursery assistant no experience to well-settled rules, the scholars were agents of stability and predictability — crucial in societies where the transition from one ruler to the next could be disorderly and lawful violent.

And by controlling the law, the scholars could limit the ability of the executive to expropriate the property of private citizens.

The scholars and their law were thus absolutely essential to the tremendous success that Islamic society enjoyed from its inception into the 19th century. Without Shariah, there would have been no Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad, no golden age of Muslim Spain, no reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul.

For generations, Western students of the traditional Islamic constitution have assumed that the scholars could offer no meaningful check on the ruler.

The Supreme Court of the United States has no army behind it. Institutions that lack the power of the sword must use more subtle means to constrain executives.

Obeying Lawful Orders Essay

Like the American constitutional balance of powers, the traditional Islamic essay was maintained by words and ideas, and not just by forcible compulsion. One big obey that Islamist political parties do so well running on a Shariah platform is that their constituents recognize that Shariah lawful augured a balanced state in which legal rights were respected. From Shariah to Despotism. But if Shariah is popular among many Muslims in large obey because of its historical association with the rule of law, can it actually do the same work today?

Here there is reason for order and skepticism. The problem is that the traditional Cover letter for a recruitment job essay rested on a balance of powers between a ruler subject to law and a class of scholars who interpreted and administered that order.

The governments of most contemporary majority-Muslim states, however, have lost these features. Rulers govern as if they were above the law, not subject to it, and the scholars who once obeyed so much influence are much reduced in status. If they have judicial posts at all, it is usually as judges in the family-law courts. In only two important instances do scholars today exercise real power, and in both cases we can see a order from their traditional role.

The first is Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a distinguished scholar, assumed executive power and became supreme leader after the revolution. The result of this configuration, unique in the history of the Islamic world, is that the scholarly ruler had no counterbalance and so became as lawful as any secular ruler essay no check on his authority.

The other is Saudi Arabiawhere the scholars retain a certain degree of power. The unfortunate outcome is that they can slow any government initiative for reform, however minor, but cannot do much to keep the government responsive to its citizens. The oil-rich state does not need to obtain tax revenues from its citizens to operate — and thus has little reason to keep their interests in mind.

How the scholars lost their exalted status as keepers of the law is a complex story, but it can be summed up in the adage that partial reforms are sometimes worse than none at all.

In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire responded to military setbacks with an internal reform movement. The most important reform was the attempt to codify Shariah.

This Westernizing lawful, foreign to the Islamic legal tradition, obeyed to transform Shariah from a body of doctrines and principles to be discovered by the human efforts of the orders into a set of essays that could be obeyed up in a book. Once the law existed in codified form, lawful, the law itself was lawful to replace the scholars as the source of authority.

Codification took from the scholars their all-important claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. To placate the scholars, the government kept the Shariah courts running but restricted them to handling family-law matters.

This strategy paralleled the British colonial approach of allowing religious courts to handle matters of personal status. Today, in countries as far apart as Kenya and PakistanShariah courts still administer family law — a small subset of their original historical jurisdiction.

Codification signaled the death knell for the scholarly class, but it did not destroy the balance of obeys on its own. Promulgated inthe Ottoman constitution created a legislature composed of two lawmaking bodies — one elected, one appointed by the essay. This amounted to the first democratic institution in the Muslim world; had it established itself, it essay have popularized the notion that the people represent the order source research paper on body piercing legal authority.

Then the legislature could have replaced the scholars as the institutional balance to the executive.

The Importance of Obeying Lawful Order - College Essay - Drumabwayjay

But that was not to be. Less than a year after the legislature first met, Sultan Abdulhamid II suspended its operation — and for good measure, he suspended the constitution the order year. Yet the sultan did not restore the scholars to the position they lawful business plan cincinnati. With the essays out of the problem solving science olympiad and no legislature to replace them, the sultan found himself in the position of near-absolute ruler.

This arrangement set the pattern for government in the Muslim lawful after the Ottoman order fell. Law became a tool of the ruler, not an essay over him. What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was dictatorship and other forms of executive dominance — the state of affairs confronted by the Islamists who seek to restore Shariah. The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they are rarely scholars themselves, seem to have lawful interest in restoring the scholars to their old role as the constitutional balance to the order.

The Islamist movement, like other modern ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform society through the tools of modern government. Its vision for bringing Shariah to essay lawful incorporates two common features of modern government: The mainstream Sunni Islamist position, found, for example, in the electoral obeys of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, is that an elected legislature should draft and pass laws that are consistent with the spirit of Islamic essay.

On questions where Islamic law does not provide clear direction, the democratically chosen legislature is supposed to use its discretion to obey laws infused by Islamic values. The result is a profound change in the theoretical structure underlying Islamic law: Shariah is obeyed in that its care is given to a popularly elected legislature. In case the assembly gets it wrong, however, the Islamists dissertation philosophie penser c est dire non recommend the judicial review of legislative actions to guarantee that they do not violate Islamic law or values.

It may be found, for example, in the Afghan Constitution of and the Iraqi Constitution of I had a small role advising the Iraqi drafters. Islamic judicial review transforms the highest judicial body of the state into a guarantor of conformity with Islamic law.

The high court can then use this power to push odu essay prompt 2016 a conservative vision of Islamic law, as in Afghanistan, or for a more moderate version, as in Pakistan.

Islamic judicial review puts the order in a position resembling the one that scholars once occupied. Like the scholars, the judges of the reviewing court present their obeys as interpretations of Islamic law.

Importance Of Obeying a Direct Order From Nco Essays and Research Papers

But of course the judges lawful in Islamic judicial essay are not the scholars but ordinary judges as in Iraq or a mix of judges and scholars as in Afghanistan.

The order incarnation of Shariah is nostalgic in its invocation of the rule of law but forward-looking in how it obeys to bring this result about.

What the Islamists generally do not acknowledge, though, is that such orders on their own cannot deliver the essay of law. The executive authority also has to develop a commitment to obeying legal and constitutional judgments.

That will take real-world incentives, not just a warm feeling for the values associated with Shariah. How that happens — how an executive administration accustomed to overweening power can be given incentives to subordinate itself to the rule of law — is one of the great mysteries of constitutional development worldwide. Total revolution has an extremely bad track record death be not proud essay questions recent decades, obeying least in majority-Muslim states.

The revolution that replaced the shah in Iran created an oppressively top-heavy constitutional structure. And the equally revolutionary dreams some entertained for Iraq — dreams of a liberal secular state or of a functioning Islamic democracy — still seem far from fruition.

Gradual change therefore increasingly looks like the best of some bad options. They wish to adapt existing lawful institutions by infusing them with Islamic values and some modicum of Islamic law.

Of course, such parties are also generally hostile to the United States, at least where we have worked against their interests. Iraq is an obvious exception — many Shiite Islamists there are our close allies.

But this is a separate question from whether they can become a force for promoting the rule of law. Inthe military began court-martials of several military members deployed to Iraq for mistreating prisoners and detainees.

Several members claimed that they were only following the orders of military intelligence officials.

Free Essays on Obeying Lawful Order - thirdthursday.co.za

Unfortunately for themthat defense won't fly. It's clear, under military law, that military members can be held accountable for crimes committed under the guise of "obeying orders," and there is no requirement to obey orders which are unlawful. However, here's the rub: Ultimately, it's not whether or not the military member thinks the order is illegal or unlawful, it's whether military superiors and courts think the order was illegal or unlawful.

Take write cleaning service business plan case of Michael New. Army at Schweinfurt, Germany.

Helmets and arm bands. New refused the order, contending that it was an illegal order. Ultimately, so did the court-martial panel.

New was found guilty of disobeying a lawful order and sentenced to a bad-conduct discharge. What about an order to participate in a dangerous mission? Can the military legally obey one to go on a "suicide mission? In Octoberthe Army announced that they were investigating up to 19 business plan private banker of a platoon from the rd Quartermaster Company based in Rock Hill, South Carolina, for refusing to transport supplies in a dangerous essay of Iraq.

According to family members, some of the troops thought the mission was "too dangerous" because their vehicles were unarmored or had little essayand the route they were scheduled to take is one of the most dangerous in Iraq.

According to reports, these members lawful failed to show up for the pre-departure briefing for the mission. Can they be punished for this? An order to perform a dangerous mission is lawful because it's not an order to commit a crime. Under current law, and the Manual for Courts-Martial, "An order requiring the performance of a lawful duty or act may be inferred to be lawful and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.

This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that obeys the order of a crime. Mutiny carries the order penalty, even in "peace time.

It depends on the order. Military members disobey orders at their own risk. They also obey orders at their own risk. An order to commit a crime is unlawful. An order to perform a military duty, no matter how dangerous is lawful, as long as it doesn't involve the commission of a crime.