To put it slightly differently, in pre-modern Islamic societies, disputes were resolved with a minimum of legislative guidance, the determining factors being informal arbitration and, equally, informal law courts. Furthermore, it appears to be a consistent pattern that, wherever mediation and law are involved in conflict resolution, morality and social ethics are intertwined, as they certainly were in the case of Islam in the pre-industrial era. By contrast, where they are absent, as they are in the legal culture of Western and, increasingly, non-Western modern nation-states, morality and social ethics are strangers. Morality, especially its religious variety, thus provided a more effective and pervasive mechanism of self-rule and did not require the marked presence of coercive and disciplinarian state agencies, the emblem of the modern body-politic. In speaking of the “legal system,” it would be neither sufficient nor even correct to dwell on the law court as the exclusive vehicle of conflict resolution.
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