Over the last decades there has been increased recognition that law and governance matter for development, be it macro-economic growth or the improvement of micro-level basic needs and freedoms. Legislation is a central part of state legal systems, and often the written legal norms are a starting point when seeking improvement of the legal system as a whole, or one of its specific aspects. This volume discusses how legislation (the product) and lawmaking (the process) function in developing countries, and how legislation contributes to development and how lawmaking and legislation can be improved either by the country itself or by donor assisted projects. It covers topics including legal transplantation, legislative quality, linkages between legislation and implementation, and the politics of lawmaking. The resultant volume combines insights from scholars, based on conceptual analysis and empirical research, with ideas from practitioners involved in lawmaking in legal technical assistance projects. Doing so, this volume aims to be useful for both academia and practice.

The aim of Sharia Incorporated is to provide unbiased and contextual information about a topic that has of late been hijacked by politics in the Muslim world as well as in the West. Sharia Incorporated, written by laudable international scholars, is an ambitious study of the incorporation of Islamic law traditions into national legal systems. The book also explores the sensitive topic of ‘Western’ human rights and other rule of law standards in a Muslim world. It provides an in-depth analysis of the role of sharia in the historical and legal formation of twelve representative Muslim states, with a unique comparison of key issues raised by the ‘Islamic awakening’ of recent decades. In the preface Jan Michiel Otto goes to the heart of the prevailing environment in which Western discourses tend to oversimplify the substance and effect of Islam and sharia.