IN Islam the concept of justice is more comprehensive, vital, and sacred than in any other system of life. Just as so many other recent western legal notions regarding human rights, equality before law, juristic personality, non-retroactivity, international relations, trade, etc, were never alien to Islam, so is the concept of judicial independence and impartiality.

Revelation, which is available in the form of the Quran and the Traditions, is the primary source of Islamic law. Regarding the administration of justice, the Quran says: “Surely We have revealed the Book to thee with truth that thou may judge between people by means of what Allah has taught thee. And be not one pleading the cause of the dishonest.” (4: 105)

It is agreed that the occasion of the revelation of the above-given verse was a dispute between a Jew and a Muslim, in which the Prophet (Peace be upon him) decided against the Muslim.

The Muslim, supported by his tribe, had falsely accused the Jew of theft. At a time when help was sorely needed for the defence of Islam, a verdict against a man supported by his tribe meant the loss of that tribe. But such considerations did not carry any weight with the Prophet and he cleared the Jew of the charge.

Thus, the verse lays down that dishonesty must be punished, and the balance of justice must be held equal between friends and foes and between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Judges are required to be so upright as not to be led swayed by the ties of relationship or by considerations of fear, favour, or compassion. The Quran says: “O you who believe, be maintainers of justice, bearers of witness for Allah, even though it be against your own selves or (your) parents or near relatives — whether he be rich or poor.... And if you distort or turn away (from truth), surely Allah is ever Aware of what you do.” (4: 135)

“O you who believe, be upright for Allah, bearers of witness with justice; and not let hatred of a people incite you not to act equitably. Be just; that is nearer to observance of duty. And keep your duty to Allah. Surely Allah is aware of what you do.” (5: 8) “.... And give full measure and weight with equity.... And when you speak, be just, though it be (against) a relative. And fulfil Allah’s covenant. This He enjoins on you that you may be mindful.” (6: 153) “.... So judge between men justly and follow not desire, lest it lead thee astray from the path of Allah. Those who go astray from the path of Allah, for them is surely a severe chastisement....” (38: 26)

The Prophet was known for his fair and impartial administration of justice. Besides Muslims, non-Muslims would also come to him for settlement of their disputes and he would adjudicate in accordance with their laws.

He strictly observed the Quranic instructions regarding equality before law, and never made any distinction between litigants on the basis of religion or relations. Instead of claiming any immunity from the law, he laid down the rule that even the head of the state may be challenged, in both official and private capacity, in the court. The following statement of the Prophet, which he made while deciding the case of a noble woman who had committed theft, demonstrates it all:

“Verily those who were before you were destroyed because when a noble man from among them committed theft, they passed no sentence on him. By Allah, had Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, committed theft, I would have cut off her hand.”

The successors of the Prophet also ensured the implementation of judicial independence and impartiality. Once Caliph Umar went to a judge for the settlement of a dispute. The judge, on seeing the Caliph, rose in his seat as a sign of respect. Umar, considering the act as an unforgivable weakness, immediately dismissed him from the office.

On another occasion, Umar caused his son to be publicly flogged for drinking alcohol. These instances show the extent to which impartiality was expected of the judge. Another example that shows how just and impartial the Islamic judiciary must be is when Caliph Ali went to the court in order to recover his armour from wrongful possession by a Jew.

As the evidence submitted by Ali was inadmissible, the judge gave his verdict in favour of the Jew. The Jew was so impressed by the fairness of Islamic judicial system that he immediately returned the armour to Ali and embraced Islam.

The following portion of a letter that was written by Ali to one of his governors, excellently explains the status and role of judiciary in Islam:

“Select for your Chief Judge one from the people who by far is the best among them; one who is not obsessed with domestic worries; one who cannot be intimidated; one who does not err too often; one who does not turn back from the right path once he finds it; one who is not self-centred or avaricious; one who will not decide before knowing full facts; one who will weigh with care every attendant doubt and pronounce a clear verdict after taking everything into full consideration; one who will not grow restive over the arguments of advocates; one who will examine with patience every new disclosure of facts; one who will be strictly impartial in his decision; one whom flattery cannot mislead; one who does not exult over his position. But it is not easy to find such men.

“Once you have selected the right man

for the office, pay him handsomely

enough to let him live in comfort and in keeping with his position, enough to keep him above temptations. Give him a position in your court so high that none can even dream of coveting it, and so high that neither backbiting nor intrigue can touch him.”

Thus, we see that Islam provides for an independent and impartial judiciary. As law, in Islam, stands at the apex of social organization, those who administer the law must likewise be elevated and kept independent of executive control. Also, it is the duty of the judges to stand firm for justice though it may be detrimental to their own interests.

HOW many years does it take to dismantle an empire? And how many wars? In the case of the Ottoman empire, the answer would seem to be about 400 years and at least 20 wars, including the world war that began in Sarajevo.

And we may not have seen the last of them. According to a recent survey, three out of every four Macedonians expect a new military conflict in their country. So who’s for another little Balkan war?

It is remarkable how many of the most pressing problems for today’s Europe can be traced back to the tangled web of ethnicities, polities and religions that the Ottomans left behind. Superimpose a map of today’s flashpoints on the outline of the 16th-century empire of Suleiman the Magnificent: it’s a pretty good fit. His realm embraced what we now call the Balkans — a term that has become a synonym for war and ethnic conflict — but also today’s Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel.

It ran down the edge of the Red Sea to Yemen, and along the coast of north Africa, from Egypt to Algeria. For the problems resulting from Israel’s presence in the Near East we have only ourselves and Adolf Hitler to blame, but for the rest, Suleiman the Magnificent must take the blame.

Now a new independent commission, chaired by the former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato, has come up with an answer for at least part of Suleiman’s legacy. Noting that violence broke out between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo only last spring, and that unemployment there runs at more than 60 per cent, they insist that the present political limbo in the Balkans is unsustainable. We can’t carry on with this patchwork of weak states and EU protectorates, with quasi-imperial viceroys like Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia and unresolved status issues, such as those around Kosovo.

According to the Amato commission, the EU’s choice is simple: enlargement or empire. Either we in the EU accept that we will have virtual colonies in our Balkan backyard for decades to come, or we start preparing the conditions in which the Balkans can join the European Union.

The commission comes out decisively for enlargement. At a meeting next year, the EU should commit itself to a plan to bring the Balkans in by 2014 — an event that could be celebrated in a summit in Sarajevo, on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. This would give a new and more positive meaning to a phrase popularized during the last war in Bosnia: “From Sarajevo to Sarajevo”.

Bosnia can, the commission believes, be made to work as an effective state, provided that it has a clear perspective of EU membership. That, and that alone, will furnish a sufficiently large incentive for Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks (that is Muslim Bosnians) to cooperate. Instead of being an EU protectorate, it should prepare to be a member state. Meanwhile, Serbia and Montenegro should make up their minds whether they want to come in as one state or two.

Most ingenious is the proposed solution for Kosovo.

This proceeds in four stages, from the current ambiguous status, defined by UN resolution 1244 at the end of the Kosovo war of 1999; through “independence without full sovereignty”, allowing for powers to be reserved to the international community in respect of human rights and minority protection; to “guided sovereignty”, as the EU engages in accession talks; and thence to the final nirvana of “shared sovereignty”, as enjoyed (or not enjoyed) by current member states of the EU, such as Slovenia, Poland or Britain.

There is a narrative of Balkan history which sees the whole 20th century as a long struggle to create nation-states out of the ruins of empire. The Amato commission proposal finesses that narrative with a new variant. This is not the misnamed enterprise of “nation-building”, by international organizations and NGOs, nor simply the more appropriately named “state-building”, but a very special European version: “member-state-building”.

If this plan is followed, as it should be, a place like Kosovo will never experience full, classic 19th-century style “national independence”. Instead, it will be like a young adult passing by carefully supervised stages from the family home to a cosy marriage.

The authors of the report, in whose pithy style I detect the hand of its gifted Bulgarian executive director, Ivan Krastev, pose the alternative to the EU as “enlargement or empire”. But seen from Kosovo, one could also say “from empire to empire”. For the European Union is also a kind of empire, a modern — or, according to some, a postmodern — version not of the centralized Roman or British empires, but of the mediaeval Holy Roman empire, with most of the effective power held by its constituent parts.

And what is proposed here is that Europe’s postmodern or neo-mediaeval empire should now absorb the remains of Suleiman’s empire. That becomes clear if you add the EU’s confirmed intention to take in the heartland of the Ottoman empire, now called Turkey.

This is heady stuff. The European parliament has given the green light for Bulgaria and Romania to join the EU in 2007. With Croatia, Turkey and the rest of the Balkans, this would mean that in just 10 years’ time the European Union would contain some 35 member states and perhaps 600 million people, of whom nearly one in six would be Muslim.

And that’s not counting east European aspirants, such as Ukraine after its orange revolution, and Belarus and Moldova after what we must hope will be their (yet to be colour-coded) velvet revolutions. Nor does it include any of the successor states of the Ottoman empire in the Near East or north Africa, although Morocco has in the past asked if it could apply. For them, the EU will have to develop a neighbourhood policy which does not depend on the promise of eventual membership.

The irony is this: at the same time as people all around the borders of this new-style empire are crying out “Take us in! Colonize us!” the member-states at its core are questioning its very raison d’etre. The two things are causally connected. It’s partly because the EU may take in Turkey that the French may vote “no” to the EU’s constitutional treaty at the end of next month.

Thus far, enlargement has strengthened not weakened the EU. But at some point, continuous extension must end up weakening the union. If Washington has to watch out for “imperial over stretch”, so does Brussels. If the European Union were to include all the remains of the Ottoman empire, it might end up sharing the fate of the Ottoman empire. Europe itself could become the “sick man of Europe”.

Yet the logic of the Amato commission is irresistible. In the Balkans, the choice is Europe or war. We talk a lot these days about a Pax Americana, as a successor to the Pax Romana. The United States played a vital role in bringing peace to the Balkans in the 1990s, and could help keep the peace there now by supporting Nato enlargement. But a Pax Americana is not on offer in Europe’s backyard. This one is up to us. Isn’t the prospect of a Pax Europeana, embracing the whole continent, worth the undoubted risk?

Since Ayaz Amir is out of the country, his weekly column ‘Islamabad Diary’ does not appear today.

BEHOLD the giant Galapagos tortoise! It weighs several hundred pounds, lives God-only-knows how long and on the day a couple of weeks ago when I was on the Galapagos Islands, could not be beholden at all.

The tortoise we wanted to see, Lonesome George, so-called because he is apparently the last of his subspecies, was in hiding. In a sense, that’s appropriate, because almost half of the United States cannot see any of the Galapagos for what they are: the home office of evolution. This is where Charles Darwin got his bright idea.

The archipelago, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, is where birds and reptiles have evolved in almost total isolation; species that exist there can be found nowhere else. Darwin, visiting the Galapagos in 1835, was stunned by what he saw and evolved a theory to explain it all: natural selection.

More recently, a pair of Princeton University scientists examined the finches on just one of the islands and noted how their beaks evolved to suit climatic conditions. A book by Jonathan Weiner about their findings, “The Beak of the Finch,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. It is now clear that in some cases evolution moves with surprising speed.

It is odd to amble around the Galapagos and see the handiwork of evolution yet at the same time bear in mind that many Americans do not accept evolution at all. It is belittled as a mere “theory,” which is a misunderstanding of the scientific term, and even in some places where it is grudgingly accepted, it is supposed to share the curriculum with creationism, as if that is an alternative theory.

It is, of course, just a fancy term for the creation according to Genesis, a matter of religious belief and not scientific theory or fact. It can have its place,

but not in the science curriculum.

The fight over evolution is an odd and sad one. There is nothing about Darwinian theory that cannot be ascribed to God — Darwin himself referred to “the Creator” in his “The Origin of Species” — and back when I was in college and studying evolution, my teacher began the semester by saying, behold the world of God or behold something else: It is entirely up to you.

Yet, 19 states are considering proposals that would require schools to question evolution, which are nothing less than proposals to inject religion into the curriculum. But why stop there? Why not introduce such skepticism into astronomy and have the sun revolve around the earth or have the earth stand still? These are questions that Clarence Darrow put to William Jennings Bryan at the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Amazingly, they still linger.

They do so not just because, as Darwin himself conceded, there are holes in the theory of evolution but because of an evolving political weakness in which intellectual honesty counts for less and less. Thus, you have political leaders from George Bush on down refusing to say whether they put any stock in evolution or believe, as apparently they think they should, that it is an affront to and assault on religion.

Back in 1999 Bush was asked whether he was “a creationist,” and he responded by not responding: “I believe children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started.” In other words, it’s all the same: evolution, creationism and maybe something else from another religious tradition. This proves you can go to Yale University and learn nothing — not about evolution, mind you, but about intellectual integrity.

The assault on evolution — some Imax theatres, mostly in the South, will not show a film that makes brief references to evolution — is an assault not just on science but on thinking and truth and skepticism. Proponents of creationism demand that you stop thinking and instead accept religious dogma. Galileo, who fought this fight, put it this way: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect, has intended us to forgo their use.”

“There is a grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote about his theory. The line is quoted by Ian McEwan in his new novel, “Saturday.” He has his protagonist, Henry Perowne, repeat the phrase and mull it into a virtual religious doctrine. “What better creation myth?” he thinks. “An unimaginable sweep of time,” he goes on, his mind hurrying through eons of change until more recent times when human beings appear with “morality, love, art, cities — and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.” Behold it. —Dawn/Washington Post Service

THE next review conference of the parties to the Treaty of the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is scheduled to be held at the UN headquarters in New York from May 2 to 27. The NPT requires a review conference every five years to assess the implementation of the treaty’s provisions and to make recommendations on measures to further strengthen it. The last review conference was held in the year 2000.

In a statement issued on March 7, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the NPT, President George W. Bush called for the cooperation of all member states to strengthen the treaty to face the challenges that have come to light since it was reviewed five years ago. He also stressed that to meet these challenges to the NPT and common security it was necessary to ensure that the treaty remains an effective instrument of global security. President Bush also reaffirmed America’s commitment to carry out its obligations under the NPT.

The preparatory committee for the 2005-NPT review conference held three sessions between April 2000 and May 2004. It devoted most of its meetings to substantive preparation for the conference and considered principles, objectives and ways to promote the full implementation of the treaty provisions as well as its universality. This committee, which was expected to produce a consensus report containing recommendations to the review conference, could not, however, do so owing to the divergent views of its participants.

Regrettably, the preparatory committee was also not able to agree on the provisional agenda for the conference for the same reason and a question mark hangs over the future of the NPT itself. The issues, which are expected to be considered at the conference are: universality of the treaty, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, safeguards, verification and compliance, nuclear weapons free zones, security assurances, peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and withdrawal from the treaty.

In the meantime, the US state department has published a document Today’s Nuclear Equation which spells out America’s position on the critical treaty-related issues. Jackie Wolcott Sanders, special representative of the US president for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, in her write-up, included in this document, has, inter alia, emphasized that the forthcoming review conference should reinforce the goal of universal NPT adherence and reaffirm that India, Pakistan and Israel may join the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states and, following the examples of South Africa and Ukraine, should forswear nuclear weapons.

A senior state department official, John Wolf, also said recently that Washington remains committed to universal adherence to the NPT and the steps taken by his country to strengthen relations with India and Pakistan should not be taken to mean that it has accepted the status of either party as a nuclear weapon state. Evidently, there is no change in Washington’s policy towards the nuclearization of South Asia but its dilemma is that these countries are not members of the NPT and hence its provisions cannot be enforced on them.

It is believed that the United States will raise this issue at the upcoming review conference and try to seek a broader consensus on it among the member states. This should open the eyes of those who have been under the illusion that the US and other world powers have accepted both India and Pakistan as nuclear-weapon states. It may be mentioned that the US has, for the first time, acknowledged Israel to be a de facto nuclear state along with India and Pakistan.

It is generally believed that the US and other nuclear powers are wary that Pakistan and India may use nuclear weapons in case there is a war between them. Those who tended to see the nuclearization of South Asia in that light also had similar concerns and anxieties. It may, however, be mentioned that a nuclear war between Pakistan and India was all but unthinkable as neither is so irresponsible as to go to that limit, whatever the pressures.

Nuclear weapons are not actually the arms of war but only a deterrent. It does not, however, mean to suggest that nuclear weapons can be retained by states permanently in the garb of deterrence or any other objective. The world will only be safe when it is free of all nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which is the sole objective of the NPT, and one that should be pursued by all nations, regardless of their special status or clout.

The nuclearization of South Asia has already served as a stabilizing factor in the region. The nuclear factor has not only prevented a war between Pakistan and India, since their nuclearization in 1998, it will continue to be an effective instrument against it in the foreseeable future. The United States and other countries should not, therefore, have any misapprehensions on this count and need not promote unrealistic aims relating to the nuclear realm in South Asia, which would be quixotic at least till the achievement of total global nuclear disarmament, as envisaged by the NPT.

On the other hand, taking a realistic view of the situation, both India and Pakistan should be recognized as de jure nuclear states to enable them to fulfil their obligations stipulated under Article 1 of the NPT. As a matter of fact, a continued de facto status held by these countries, with no compulsion to honour the NPT obligations, may prompt many members to withdraw from the treaty to fulfil their nuclear ambitions. North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT is a case in point.

The NPT is discriminatory in favour of the most powerful five nations as it legitimizes nuclear weapons in their hands while banning their acquisition by others. Similarly, IAEA safeguards are obligatory for non-weapon states and not for the five recognized nuclear weapon states. An indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 at the instance of the United States, without specifying any deadline for fulfilling the treaty’s obligation by the nuclear-weapon states towards total elimination of their nuclear arsenals that may lead to complete nuclear disarmament, was actually aimed at legitimizing the possession of nuclear weapons and their retention by them, in perpetuity, which is a material breach of the treaty by these states.

The forthcoming review conference should, therefore, give serious consideration to this anomaly otherwise not only the attainment of the goal of non-proliferation would remain an illusion but the very survival of the NPT would be in jeopardy.

Needless to say, the complete elimination of nuclear weapons is the only guarantee against the threat of a nuclear war and preservation of international peace and security. The United States, being the leading exponent of nuclear non-proliferation, has a special responsibility towards this end.

The writer is a former ambassador.