The new Islamic law center at Yale University opened last fall, and it's beginning this year with a speaker from the University of Chicago, Ahmed El Shamsy.
El Shamsy is coming to Yale to talk about, well, breaking the law.
"The question of what do you have to do when you have a situation in which you actually have to break the law," he said.
Of course he's not talking about petty crimes. He's talking about moral and ethical dilemmas.
Take human shields, for example. Is okay for police or an army to kill a civilian who's being used as a human shield -- if it means saving many more lives? And who gets to make those decisions?
"This is not just about human shields. We have this about torture, or enhanced interrogations," El Shamsy said. "We have these discussions in the United States about targeted killings. Does one need to have a court decision on this, can the president make this decision on his own? So these kinds of discussions have a long history in western thought, they have a long history in Islamic thought."
These discussions are what the Islamic center hopes to bring to the Yale community, says law professor and center co-director Anthony Kronman.
"Many of the questions which are at the center of this field really are, or at least ought to be, of general interest to a much wider, general audience," he said.
The center sparked controversy when it opened late last year because the founding donor, Abdallah Kamel, is from Saudi Arabia, a country known for its strict interpretation of Islamic law. Kronman says he understands that concern, but
"Frankly, the only alternative is to stay out all together, which seems to me to disserve the ultimate objectives, of understanding and fair-minded judgment," Kronman said.
El Shamsy said there are many interpretations of Islamic law because of its diverse history, while many non-Muslims only understand its most fundamentalist version.
El Shamsy is scheduled to speak at Yale on Tuesday, January 26.
