Slim Laghmani has been invited by the Collège de France assembly at the suggestion of Pr Samantha Besson.
Abstract
Is there a Muslim exception in international law ? This lecture will attempt to show that there is not. The law of nations in Islam is not a positive law, any more than is the Roman jus gentium. It should therefore not be judged against the yardstick of contemporary international law. To be intelligible, Muslim law of nations, which used to be called " siyar " (rules governing Muslims' behavior towards non-Muslims), must be compared with the legal corpus that was lectured on in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
In its normative content, Muslim law of nations was much more determined by the historical-political framework in which it was developed and codified, the empire, than by the Muslim faith. Its form, internal rationality and foundation, on the other hand, have been determined by a reading, a voluntarist interpretation of Islam that has been erected as orthodoxy, another fact of history.
The peculiarity of Muslim law of nations lies in the fact that this normative content, internal rationality and foundation have been sacralized and thus fixed, and that this historicity has been somehow repressed, so that ordinary Muslims attribute to the divine what has been a human fact.
