Page 185 - UAE Truncal States
P. 185

Chapter Four

                 committed either by immigrants who had come during the pearling
                 boom or by desperate, impoverished beduin raiders. Neither group
                 was really part of the communities in the coastal towns which  wore
                 mostly affected by this development. The call for jurisdiction by the
                 sharl'ah judges rather than the Ruler in such cases signified that
                 sharVah became universally accepted because it could overrule the
                 temporal Ruler’s whims and was binding on all Muslims no matter
                 where they were born.
                   The dualism, and in some instances even polarisation, of cus­
                 tomary jurisdiction and sharl'ah became more acute from the 1930s
                 on. People were aware that not all cases and not everyone should be
                 subject to the traditional jurisdiction. The development during the
                 1940s of a set of regulations for the trial of foreigners on the one hand
                 and the necessity to introduce laws to deal with novel offences such
                 as traffic accidents, labour and contractual disputes on the other
                 hand, led to the limitation of the jurisdiction of the sharl'ah in the
                 Trucial States, in the same way as it is limited in most Muslim
                 countries. Already during the late 1940s the sharl'ah courts in Dubai
                 operated a register of marriages which took place in the town, and
                 became the authority which handled all matters relating to personal
                 status, family affairs and inheritance, while criminal offences
                 reverted to the political authorities, both local and British. Regu­
                 lations were devised for new situations by way of Rulers’ decrees
                 and His Majesty’s Order in Council.05
                   The fact that sharl'ah, in the narrower sense of the law such as is
                 administered by specialised graduates from foreign law schools, has
                 not been the exclusive legal and judicial authority anywhere in the
                 Trucial States, does not preclude the important role of the spirit of
                 sharl'ah as the common guide for relationships between the people.
                 It is therefore not surprising that the current efforts of federal and
                 regional authorities in the UAE to create a new code of laws, which
                 suits the vastly transformed society of the present day, do not only
                 try to adapt other Arab or European laws, but also follow the
                 growing trend throughout Muslim Stales to base laws on the
                 sharl'ah by re-interpreting fiqh. The very undoctrinal religiousness
                 of the local society, rather than legalistic deliberations concerning
                 the reconciliation of different sources of law, help to pave the way for
                 the ascendancy of sharl'ah in legislation and jurisdiction in the UAE
                 at the present time.66


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