ISLAMIC LAW AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE TERMS OF A RELATIONSHIP

Islamic law is virtually unknown among us and yet it is increasingly relevant. This paper intends to remedy, in part, the lack of familiarity and respond to the increased importance. It presents islamic law as a differentiated legal system and discusses the relations it may entertain, of complementarities and of tensions, with domestic legal systems, with private international law and with public international law. Because it is a set of legal norms that has a vocation to govern all sectors of life in society, and since it occupies spaces that are still reserved to it by many states, it may be called upon to perform unexpected roles, by the game of the rules of conflict of laws and of conflict of jurisdictions in private international law, as well as it may affect the development of public international law, specially as it influences the latter's sources.