Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Norman Doe and John Witte, Jr., for welcoming this work within the Brill Research Perspectives in Law and Religion series that they co-lead. This book stems from years of research and conversations with experts in law and international relations, without whom it would have never seen the light of day.
A lot of inspiration came from years of intense collaboration with the Oasis Foundation in Venice and Milan. Several debates and informal chats with Vittorio Emanuele Parsi and Riccardo Redaelli were crucial to understanding the Middle East and why fundamental categories of the rule of law fail to apply in the region. I feel privileged to have been included among the McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellows of 2024–2029 of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. I lost track of how many times have I had to thank John Witte, Jr. (John has failed me only when he took me and my son fishing) and the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at large, which has been so helpful throughout the writing process. The help of Whittney Barth and Amy Wheeler has been critical, as have been the editorial input of Ellen Wert and the comments of two anonymous reviewers.
Heartfelt thanks go to Tommaso Edoardo Frosini for encouraging me to take a fresh look at the logic of the rule of law in a book that I published within his series1 and to the Notre Dame Religious Freedom Initiative, which invited me to present on religious freedom in the Middle East.2 I am deeply grateful to Francesco Biagi, who was so kind to read the manuscript and offer very useful comments.
If there is one thing that I learned from the Middle East, that is that there is no such thing as the Middle East. There are several Middle Easts living—and often struggling—together. It is a type of extreme pluralism—much more extreme than the one Westerners like me are used to. If this small work helps to make it slightly more understandable to the rest of the world, it will have done its job. By showing the distance between the Middle Eastern and the Western models of constitutionalism, I want to bring the two of them a little closer so they can better understand each other.
I dedicate this book to the people of the Middle East who are so dear to my heart. I conceived of the volume when ISIS was at its sunset in Syria and Iraq, and I finish it while Israel is sieging Gaza, where hostages are held, and Lebanon is in turmoil. I wish my book were not so timely.