Abstract
The manner in which the police interact with their minorities essentially depends on the nation’s particular historical, legal, social, political, and religious characteristics. Research on the relationship between police and minorities in the Arab world merits scrupulous analysis, but has not received the required consideration. During the last two centuries, the Arab world remained the focus of European colonial powers and as such continued to be an area of deconstruction and experimentation in the criminal justice realm of colonial administration. As a result, the current mixture of legal traditions in the Arab world emerges as an interesting area of study in examining the often-troubled relationship between police and minorities. With the exception of Lebanon, which has a sizeable non-Muslim population and an arrangement of power sharing among the different religious communities, all other Arab police forces comprise a vast majority of Muslims. In the following chapter, I explore some of the strategies various Arab governments are using in policing their minorities. Case studies of Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia are presented to examine how distinct minorities are handled by the criminal justice system and police in these particular Muslim-dominated societies. These countries provide examples of policing by Muslim officers of their minorities.
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3552-5_10
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3552-5_10
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Quassini, N., Verma, A. (2012). Policing Minorities in the Arab World. In: Policing Muslim Communities. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3552-5_7
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