>As for Islam, culture and law, they seem to be way too intertwined for my
>taste
>in many countries. But then, the bourgeois revolution and the separation
>of
>religion and the State has not quite been completed yet in many areas of
>the
>world.
>
>"In sharia there are theoretical and practical rules related to women.
>Theoretically, all the rules concerning women derive from the slavery
>system.
I think this needs to be properly qualified and contextualised. First of all, the Shari'a can be codified in any number of ways, and it needn't necessarily be repressive. I think you are right when you indicate that the precise form religion take is closely related to social relations, but you are wrong in suggesting that the repressiveness of contemporary Political Islam has anything to do with feudalism. Islam has historically *not* been a major source of repression: barbarism (mutilations, amputations etc) tended to be extraneous to it. In fact, it is so difficult to convict someone of a crime under Shari'a law that people in Islamic societies have tended to be subject to summary justice at the hands of market guards or state deputies rather than sentencing by jurists.
The curious thing about the modernisation of Shari'a is its bifurcate structure: as it involved converting Shari'a into a Napoleonic Code with an Islamic face, it could in fact become the basis of more liberal polities or vastly more repressive ones. And I tend to associate the repressiveness of Islamic states today with their enforcement of the prerogatives of capital: in Iran, it was the success of the conservative bourgeoisie in hegemonising the revolution that led to it being so repressive - the Council of Guardians is there essentially to thwart the democratic incursion of the masses, ruling any piece of legislation which threatens property rights incompatible with Islam; in Saudi Arabia, the government manipulates the Shari'a for the very secular purpose of maintaining hegemony and keeping the oil capital flowing (given how difficult it is to obtain a conviction under Shari'a, they simply extract or confect 'confessions' from those they accuse of wrong-doing).
The topic of Personal Status Law and the treatment of women merits particular attention: the Arab nationalist regimes which reformed the laws to improve the rights of women did so precisely by seeking endorsement from the ulama, deriving their decisions from ancient Sunna etc. The core texts in Islam - the Quran, hadiths, Prophetic Tradition and so on - are so indeterminate as to be susceptible to a variety of interpretations.
I don't mind directing you to my own piece on this topic:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/12/sharia-law-and-assorted-bogey-men.html
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