The Codification of Islamic Criminal Law in the Sudan: Penal Codes and Supreme Court Case Law under Numayri and al-Bashir.

• Author: Jones-Pauly, Christtna
• Position: Book review

The Codification of Islamic Criminal Law in the Sudan: Penal Codes and Supreme Court Case Law under Numayrl and al-Bashlr. By OLAF KONDGEN. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, vol. 43. Leiden: BRILL, 2018. Pp. xii + 480. $171, [euro]149.

Olaf Kondgen's revised 2013 dissertation at the University of Amsterdam enhances the blossoming literature critical of the reintroduction of Islamic penal law in several states because of its incompatibility with human rights. It presents a wealth of knowledge about the application of Islamic penal law in the Sudan commencing in the Penal Code of 1983, followed by the Criminal Act of 1991, as amended in 2015. He compares the Sudan statutory amendments with one another and with the court decisions interpreting the statutes, both comparisons against the backdrop of the historical classical opinions of the legal scholars (mainly Sunni) along with the opinions of some modernist Islamic jurists.

The volume's aim is to point out how the Sudanese interpretations contradict the majority opinions of the classical legal scholars to a large extent and represent minority opinions. For criminal law his book is on the order of Y. Linant de Bellefonds's work on comparative Islamic family and civil law. The legal offenses covered in the book are homicide, bodily harm, extramarital sexual intercourse, unfounded accusations thereof, theft, apostasy, alcohol consumption, highway robbery, and non-quranic punishments (ta'zir). Why the offense of abortion in Arts. 135ff. of the Sudan Criminal Act of 1991 is omitted is not clear--there is reference to only one fiqh opinion on embryo killing (p. 305) despite there being a variety of traditional opinions; see R. Lohlker, Scharia und Moderne: Diskussionen uber Schwangerschaftsabbruch, Versicherung und Zinsen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft, 1996). The book concludes that the Sudanese political authorities responsible for the re-Islamization of penal law wanted to make the people believe their version was Islamic when in fact it was not. It was a national version, a Sudanese version--a pseudo-Islamic law rather than an authentic replication of Islamic penal law.

From a lawyer's point of view the book makes a significant contribution to legal studies using case law, in the tradition of common law. The judgments are only those that are reported in the Sudan Law Journal Reports (SLJR) from 1983 to 2002, the highest number cited being from 1984, 1985, and 1989; there are three judgments from the twenty-first century...