Tag: mclp

It didn't take me a week like I said in the introductory post. I figured out the skeleton of how I am going to do the MCLP project.

I'm not trying to compile a historical narrative of one area of law. History, and specialization, is for academics. I am trying to create a live database of all important, interesting & problematic legislation occurring in the Muslim world and all legislation in the West affecting Muslims, positively or negatively. It is something academics will be able to use to write papers and journalists to stay abreast of what is happening to Muslims everywhere and activists to use to create connections with one another. It will be concerned with what is happening now; not what happened.

What I need are connections with legislators, or people close to the legislative groups. That is how I got a hold of the Women's Protection Bill in Pakistan.

Hopefully this won't be as hard as it sounds (actually it sounds hard to you; it sounds pretty easy to me). I'm optimistic for the simple reason that I know that once I get over the language issue -- for which I will have to use mediators -- the information is out there. It helps that a number of Muslim countries have people incredibly proficient with English. It also helps that my friends and I know at least one someone who (with verbal bribery) will be able to serve as a go between. I also plan on doing some traveling. DC, London and Paris I can get to myself.

So, this is the plan:

Step 1: Open up communicative channels with people close to the legislative groups in the following countries:

United States, United Kingdom, France, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan

For now the list will be these 7 nations. However, if I get the opportunity to make a connection elsewhere, that country will get added to the list. I suspect that the most likely country to make it in will be Palestine (yeah the irony isn't lost on me).

Step 2: Acquire Eteraz.Org language experts. All I really need at the moment are  dedicated Farsi and Turkish speakers. The other languages are covered.

Step 3: Acquire people interested enough to try and understand what the hell the legislation is saying. Right, that's my job. So there, one step is already taken care of.

Step 4: Start getting an idea of how to narrow the focus only on the "hot" items. This will be purely discretionary.

Step 5: Trying to figure out whether or not to include other people's analytic commentary as something I should cover. For example, let's say there is an immigration bill in Britain. Should I also be covering the entire public discourse surrounding the issue? I suppose I have no choice.

Step 6: Understanding the history of the legislative issue. If, for example, we're talking about legislation about women's inheritance rights in Turkey, it would be nice to know what's happened in the past. For this the career academics in the West will have to be tapped. If they happen to be shawties I'll tap em again.

In my open letter to Islamospheric bloggers I stated the following:

We have to creat a Muslim Countries Legislation Project. We spend too much time talking about the theory of Islamic Law. We have no idea what is happening in the Parliaments and Judiciaries and Senates of Muslim nations. Important laws need to be examined, repealed, challenged, and questioned. The academics aren't doing this. The papers have no idea how to. We have to do it. Unless we know how Iran's stoning laws came into existence, we won't know how to repeal them.

In the year 2007 I am going to be obsessed with this. With the Women's Protection Bill in Pakistan and the stoning laws in Iran I've had some practice. It is time to take it to the next step.

I have learned that assigning and delegating research tasks does not work. Nothing, for example, has come out of this (which is fine, because it teaches us what is not realistic). In short, I'm going to take the lead in the MCLP myself. The tag I will use for my research will be "eteraz mclp." I will also use the "Mclp" tag. If some of you decide to contribute, please use only the "mclp" tag.

I'm going to start with the United States and Iran. What I need to do right now is to devise a model and a methodology.

I will do that over the next week.