Introduction: Legal Pluralism and Shari’a

Abstract

Legal pluralism may be simply defined as the development of a number of different legal traditions within a given sovereign territory. Legal pluralism is often held to be a challenge to legal centralism, a legal doctrine claiming that the state has a monopoly over law making in its sovereign space. Opponents of state centralism based on state sovereignty and a legal monopoly often regard it as an ideology rather than a legal doctrine. The modern critique of legal centralism is associated with an influential article (‘What is Legal Pluralism?’) by John Griffith (1986), but the origin of the theory of legal pluralism goes back to Eugen Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law that was published in 1913. In many societies legal pluralism is now related to the recognition of indigenous traditional laws and, consequently, it is often referred to as ‘Unofficial Law.’ Studies of native traditions—such as Llewellyn and Hoebel’s The Cheyenne Way (1941)—have influenced recognition of the importance of custom in the normative foundation of law and thence the legal order of society. The debate about legal pluralism is also closely associated with theories of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism (de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). These debates around pluralism raise a host of difficult conceptual issues, including the problem of defining law itself. Before turning to some of these vexed definitional issues, we should start with a brief consideration of the so-called ‘legal centralism’ position.