Quote:To me it seems that Sharia law is very effective if punishing many morality crimes (esp. women's crimes), however absent when reigning in the thefts and murders perpetrated by say these Somali pirates against non-muslims.Up until quite recently, the legal code in Somalia was not based on Sharia. This is apparently changing. However, it seems clear enough to me that the problem has nothing to do with their legal code being Western, Islamic, or whatever else, it's that the government is not in control of its own country, and thus cannot enforce any law at all. They have been living with decades of anarchy, and piracy is an all-too-obvious result.
Quote:I reject a legal system that at its core, does not guarantee that all individuals are treated equally, which is a distinctly "Western" concept.A distinctly enlightenment concept, maybe. Certainly the Greeks didn't believe it, at least, not for "all individuals"; they had great masses of slaves, thought foreigners had no rights, and kept women under the boot. (Gotta give them credit for homosexuals, though.) The state may have been, in theory, the instrument of the people, but it was still only a slice of the people. This is something that occurred to me last night about Pete's definition about individual rights and the Greeks. It's all well and good to have a philosophical, rather than geographical, definition for what is "Western". But the problem is that an individual rights definition makes the "West" simply vanish from the globe from the rise of the Roman Empire until at least the 16th century, and by any practical standard, much later. European states were Divine Right Monarchies, aristocratic Oligarchies and "Republics" which were scarcely concealed Oligarchies. Even if we count republican city-states as "Western" in the individual rights sense, they are a few tiny islands in a thousand-year ocean of Kings, Princes and Emperors.
A representative democracy of the kind practiced in Athens doesn't really appear again in Europe until the 1750s with Pascal Paoli in Corsica. The philosophical underpinnings come earlier, but not that much earlier: Locke wasn't until 1650, and was contemporary with such "Western" yet anti-democratic philosophers as Hobbes. The Italians probably get the kudos for instituting some form of it slightly earlier, but a quick read of Machiavelli would show just how ambiguous this was. So, yes, those are "Western" ideas in terms of having Greek origins, and "Western" in the sense that they happened in Europe rather than, say, India, but the yawning historical gap between Athens and the rise of democratic rights in Europe makes it seem suspect to me.
-Jester