[MUSIC] Welcome to constitutional struggles in the Muslim world. You have clearly read the newspapers. You are aware of the current upheavals, which might be one of the reasons you are interested in this course. What we're trying to do here is to provide you with an overview of all Muslim majority countries. Trying to show you the historic developments, the cultural developments, the legal developments that are currently determining the political struggles that we see currently unfolding in the Muslim world. We are aware of the very ambitious scope in terms of geography and in terms of population and cultural scope of this course. So, in terms of expectation management, we will not be able to provide you with very detailed information about any one particular country or region. But what we can do is to give you an overview. Allow you to make connections between time and space to find interesting markers that will commit you to go on and study further on your own. I see my role a little bit like a tour guide who takes you on to a trip and who provides you markers for further study. A little bit like a friend who's been there before and who says check this out. This is a cool thing. This is important because it refers back to somewhere where we've been before. So don't look at me necessarily as the expert knowing everything about the particular country or region that we will explore rather than somebody who is providing you the overview. Allowing you make connections and draw conclusions and draw.these very diverse regions together. My name is Ebrahim Afsah, I am an associate professor of international law here at the faculty of law at the University of Copenhagen. I was born in Iran and raised in Germany, trained in England, Ireland and the United States. And as I said now here I teach law and the approach I am taking here is not necessarily strictly legal. We will look at insights from political science and some other disciplines and part of the things that I would like you to take out of this course is to focus not strictly on the legal text, but try to find an appreciation for the wider cultural political social context in which constitutional developments appear in the countries here. And as we will look at a very broad range of countries, I would like you to keep three common themes in mind that will guide our exploration of this very diverse subject area. The first is that we will try to focus in this course on the legal and social reality, not on the dogmatic text, be it religious or constitutional. What we mean here is that we will like to see the law and the politics as they are actually played out, not as its proponents claim they should be. This is a first departure from some of you who do Islamic studies, for example, at universities, which often have a very philological, textual approach. So this is the not approach you will take here. We focus on the legal and social reality. The second theme that we like to focus here is the practical tensions that's derived from the limited administrative capability that many of the states that we will look at have and that in my view, derive from the incomplete reception of modern statehood. So, statehood and administrative capabilities, and a whole package of the modern state is one of the things that we will look at in each and every country and region of this course. And last but not least, the third common theme that will guide us here is the popular dissatisfaction that we will see played out right now in many of these constitutional struggles that are ongoing at the moment. And the driving force for these popular upheaval is often normative. They're struggles about values. But they're often quite mundane things. It's dissatisfaction with public transport, dissatisfaction with the ability of the government to provide clean water, good housing, good education. So these are some of the things that we will look at. Apart from these three common themes, there's one basic approach I'd like you to remember as we go through this course. Look at this photo, what do you think is wrong with this photo? It reduces normal happy child to one of his many attributes, sitting in a wheelchair. It objectifies him and it removes him from his peers. And it seems to be based on the belief that there's a set of attributes that are necessary for an individual or group to understand their identity, their function. And in this example, of course it's important that this child sits in a wheelchair. If you were to discuss a school trip that might involve hiking in the woods. But is it truly the one and only necessary attribute that defines and sets him apart from his peers when we discuss, for example, student's abilities to learn languages or drawing? And I believe this photo shows a better approach. Here it's the same boy in the striped shirt in the front. But now it commits us to see commonalities without creating artificially rigid boundaries. Likewise there's a tendency to create Islam as a total civilization. Not just a religion but a political and social system. With divinely revealed law at its core that explains the totality of the Muslims thoughts, actions, way of being and it is held that this religious law constitutes the essence of what a Muslim is and it allows us to determine how this Muslim will act or think. And this is not just the way that westerners have looked at the east. There's a kind of ideological symbiosis between Western Orientalists looking like this at the east and Eastern Islamists who have a very similar view about themselves. In this course I do not believe this essentialist approach is either empirically sustainable, analytically helpful, or normatively defensible. So we will try to avoid this approach. In the next video, you will be presented with the region and its people and we will give you a rough overview of what are we actually gonna look at in this course. And then we will follow with the challenge that modernity, the modern period has posed for this group of nations and its peoples, and how they have reacted and responded to it. So I look forward to see you in the next installment. [MUSIC]