A University of Dundee expert on international energy law and policy will address issues of Islam and modernisation at a London seminar this week (5/10) in memory of the late Dr Ibrahim Shihata - a former leading figure of the World Bank and, in the months before his death, a senior professor at the University's internationally respected Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy.
Professor Thomas Walde, director of the Centre will talk of Dr Shihata's liberal but definitively Muslim perspective on the global economy.
Professor Walde: "In his last talk in Dundee Dr Shihata - who made a great contribution to the University's new international business transactions programme - explained his defence of the World Bank against attempts by the US to instrumentalise it for its foreign policy purposes.
"It was his desire to contribute to a modernising of Muslim and Sharia legal thought in order to free them from recent very rigid approaches obstructing modernisation of the Muslim world by returning to the original approaches of the Quaran and the Hadith of the Prophet in a historical and teleological perspective. Shihata's reflections have become more relevant as we now face a tendency to identify Islam with fringe radicalism which has existed in Islam, as in other religions, throughout its existence."
The London Forum for International Economic Law and Development is organised by the International Financial Law Unit at the University of London and the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. It takes place on October 5 at the Senate House, Malet St, London and is co-sponsored by the University of Dundee.
The Forum aims to pool and foster specialised scholarship in international economic and development law in developing countries. It is dedicated to Dr Ibrahim Shihata former senior vice president and general counsel of the World Bank (1983-1998) and Secretary General of the ICSID, a world leading expert on international economic and development law whose vision inspired this initiative./ends