Mallat is the son of Nouhad Diab and Wajdi Mallat, the first president of the Lebanese Constitutional Council (Arabic المجلس الدستوري) of Lebanon, from 1994 to 1997, and has three sisters. His namesake grandfather was known across the Arab world as 'the Poet of the Cedars'. His granduncle Tamer Mallat was a judge and a poet, whose decisions and poetry he rediscovered and published; he also edited a selection of his father's writings in a bilingual French and Arabic book.
He is married to Nayla Chalhoub, and they have two adult sons. He published an illustrated book for children in 1997, Aventures a Beyrouth, with his son.
Educated in Lebanon, the United States and Europe, Mallat received his PhD from the law department of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990.
Career
Iraq has been a focus for him since 1982 as key to change in the Middle East, and he founded the International Committee for a Free Iraq (ICFI) in 1991 with Edward Mortimer and Ahmad Chalabi to seek the end of dictatorship in Baghdad.[1] The ICFI brought together about a hundred Iraqi and international personalities, including leading US senators like Claiborne Pell, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and John McCain, as well as British MP David Howell, then chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, and respected Arab public figures like Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Adonis, see Adunis.[2] Many of the committee's Iraqi members became the leaders of Iraq after the end of Baathist dictatorship in 2003, including Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum as the first president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Jalal Talibani as president and Hoshyar Zebari as Foreign Minister. Mallat was opposed to the US-led invasion,[3] and sought with the support of then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz an alternative Security Council Resolution that would have declared Saddam Hussein's presidency illegitimate and advocated the deployment of human rights monitors in Iraq during the transition to democracy.[4]
In 1995, he initiated a campaign against Saddam Hussein with officials in Kuwait, London and Washington that developed into INDICT, a nongovernmental organisation he helped found in Britain in 1996.[citation needed] By 1998, INDICT had received open support in the American Congress and in the British Parliament, and was embraced by then US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.[5] The campaign laid the ground for a case against Saddam Hussein in Belgium in 2002, and his eventual trial in Iraq in 2005. A third case was won against Muammar Gaddafi in Beirut courts for the families of the historic leader of the Shi'i community Musa al-Sadr and his two companions, journalist Abbas Badreddin and cleric Muhammad Ya`qub, who disappeared in Libya upon their official invitation by Gaddafi in August 1978.[6]
In 12 February 2003, he won a judgement in the case of Victims of Sabra and Shatila v. Ariel Sharon et al., under the law of universal jurisdiction in Belgium which resulted in Belgium removing the court's jurisdiction.[7] He visited Iraq in late 2003 and again in early 2004 to accelerate the recognition of the Iraqi Governing Council as the official government of Iraq, a move opposed by Paul Bremer and Kofi Annan.[8]
In 2006-2007, he spent one year at Princeton University where he was a Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, Fellow in the University Center for Human Values, Fellow in the Program in International and Regional Studies and a Distinguished Visitor in the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice.[9] A became a professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Law at the University of Utah since 2007 and a Presidential Professor in 2009. He is now an emeritus professor.
Mallat was appointed in 2011 Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. In Summer 2014, he helped the Iraqi president Fouad Masum and Parliamentary Speaker Salim al-Jabouri construct the constitutional argument that put an end to the Prime Ministership of Nouri al-Maliki.[10]
He taught in Fall 2012 at Yale Law School as Visiting Professor of Law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow.[11] In Spring 2015, he was a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
In 2016, he helped found Humanist Lebanon, organizing regular demonstrations in the centre of Beirut to end the presidential void in the name of the Constitution.[12]
In 2017, he resigned his full-time positions at Saint Joseph's University and at the University of Utah, but remained on the University of Utah's law faculty as Emeritus Presidential Professor of Law. In 2023, he was invited as visiting senior fellow at the school of law of Sciences-Po in Paris to develop his work on comparative constitutional law.[13]
2006 presidential campaign
In his native Lebanon, Mallat ran for president in 2005-2006 in an unprecedented challenge to the incumbent, Emile Lahoud, who had relied on the Damascus government of Bashar al-Asad to force an unconstitutional extension of his mandate. During the Cedar Revolution which was triggered by the assassination of the president's main opponent, Rafiq al-Hariri, Mallat was active in street protests and in the leadership,[14] where his central advocacy was the establishment of an international, hybrid tribunal to arrest and try the assassins of Hariri and scores of other victims - eventually known as the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and the removal of the 'coercively-extended president' from power.'[15] Mallat's campaign was initiated in November 2005 to push a fractured and direction-less revolution towards its active materialisation in a presidency 'that looked like the people who made it.'[16]
Denigrated by some as 'quixotic',[17] the campaign was received in the local, regional and international media as a breakthrough for Arab democracy in its direct, people-based nonviolent challenge to dictators for life.[18] Over a period of seven months, Mallat's team took its message to several cities and villages of Lebanon, and was supported by unprecedented mobilisation of the Lebanese diaspora, especially in the US. Internationally, the campaign culminated in a Security Council Presidential Statement that undermined the legitimacy of Emile Lahoud, and translated in a mass popular meeting on 14 March 2006 with a single motto: 'Lahoud must go'.[19] As 'the primary architect' of Lahoud's demise,[20] Mallat joined with the leadership of the March 14 coalition to develop his constitutional, nonviolent plan to replace Lahoud by a freely elected president.[21] With the political deadlock that ensued, Mallat predicted a new bout of 'immense violence' descending on the country.[22]
When the war against Israel was triggered by Hezbollah on 12 July 2006, Mallat was forced to interrupt his campaign on the ground. He denounced the attack of Hezbollah and debated its foreign affairs representative on television in the midst of the bombardments. Soon after the ceasefire, which he had helped engineer through an active collaboration with the Lebanese government's acting foreign minister, he accepted an offer by Princeton University and left for the US with his family. At Princeton, he completed six books, including two on the campaign.[23]
In 2023, the Lebanese leader Walid Jumblat put his name repeatedly out for the presidency of Lebanon, arguing his appeal to the youth, his competence in law and economics, and his legal achievements.[24][25]
Writings
Mallat is the author or editor of some forty books, and has published dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters.[26]
Collaborative work
Academic collaborative work has seen him serving as a joint founder and general editor of the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, now at Brill,[27] a series on 'Horizons Européens' for the Centre d'Etudes de l'Union Européenne at Saint Joseph University,[28] and a series on Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at Kluwer Law International as director of the Center of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies.[29] He has also contributed several entries and chapters to specialised encyclopedias of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and of comparative law.[30] In 2014, he helped found and became the commissioning editor of Bada'e',[31] a niche publishing house of books in Arabic, French and English on the Middle East.
Islamic and Middle Eastern law
In his work on Islamic and Middle Eastern law, he has engaged scholarship from the West and from the Middle East in a search for a common language of human rights and the rule of law to be conveyed from within the uniquely rich legal tradition of the Middle East from Hammurabi to the present. His first book, the Renewal of Islamic Law, which focused on the legal works of the most innovative Islamic scholar of the 20th century, the Iraqi Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, received the North America Middle East Studies Association's annual prize, the Albert Hourani Book Award. Its Arabic version, published in 1998, circulated underground in Iraq until the demise of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and was reprinted several times since. The book was reviewed in over a hundred academic and press outlets, and revealed to the West a humanist scholarship at the highest intellectual level in Najaf. In 2009, he published Iraq- Guide to Law and Policy at Aspen/Kluwer Law International.
His Introduction to Middle Eastern Law, was published in 2007, and expanded the field of Islamic law to include the Middle East pre-Islamic legal tradition as an important component for legal research, and to prominently feature case law as a novel and essential focus to understand the law applied in everyday's life.[32]
In 2023, he published an extensive treatise on Saudi Arabian Law at Oxford University Press, The Normalization of Saudi Law.
Related Research Articles
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References
↑ A.M. Rosenthal, 'On my mind: Praying in London', The New York Times, 25 June 1991
↑ Mallat, 'Voices of opposition: The International Committee for a Free Iraq', in E. Goldberg, R. Kasaba and J. Migdal eds., Rules and Rights in the Middle East: Democracy, Law and Society, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1993; Mallat, 'Claiborne Pell and the roots of Iraqi regime change', The Daily Star, 13 January 2010
↑ See statement of Wolfowitz in 'Senior Defense Officials Interview with Chris Core, WMAL Radio', 4 March 2003 "Defense.gov News Transcript: Senior Defense Officials Interview with Chris Core, WMAL Radio". Archived from the original on 2012-10-26. Retrieved 2012-03-06.; Text of UNSCR draft and generally on 'the Democratic Iraq Initiative' in Mallat, Iraq: Guide to Law and Policy, Kluwer, Boston 2009, 'The March to War', 209-31; on human rights monitors deployment, Id. at 150.
↑ Victims of Sabra and Shatila v. Ariel Sharon et al., Belgian Court of Cassation, Feb. 12, 2003, 42 International Legal Materials 596 (2003). On this case, see for example, John Borneman ed., The case of Ariel Sharon and the fate of universal jurisdiction (Princeton 2004) (including essays by John Borneman, Chibli Mallat, Luc Walleyn, Laurie King-Irani, Dan Rabinowitz, Sally Falk Moore, Paul W. Kahn, and Reed Brody); Deena Hurwitz, 'Universal Jurisdiction and the Dilemmas of International Criminal Justice: The Sabra and Shatila Case in Belgium', in Human Rights Advocacy Stories 267 (Hurwitz, Satterthwaite & Ford eds., 2009); Steven R. Ratner, 'Belgium's War Crimes Statute: a Postmortem' 97 American Journal of International Law 888 (2003).
↑ Mallat, 'Note to the U.N.: Hands Off Iraqi Politics', The New York Times, 19 January 2004 ; Mallat, 'The record of UN apparatchiks and what can no longer be accepted in Iraq', The Daily Star, 12 June 2003 Archived 2017-10-06 at the Wayback Machine .
↑ Mallat, 2221- Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, an Essay on Nonviolence and Justice, Beirut, Lir, 2007, 88, also available at .
↑ See for instance, speech at Restaurant Al Dente, 3 February 2006, Bayrut fi khabar al-mustaqbal (Beirut in a future mode), reproduced in Presidential Talk, Beirut, Dar al-Jadid, 2007, also available at "Archived copy"(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 2014-08-14. Retrieved 2012-10-04.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link).
↑ Blanford, Nicholas (2007). Killing Mr Lebanon (Repr.ed.). London: I.B. Tauris. p.208. ISBN9781845112028. Mallat announced in October that he was running for the presidency and launched a small-scale but polished campaign to pursue what was a somewhat quixotic goal.
↑ Some thirty profiles were published, including in Newsweek, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Voice of America, the main Arab papers, Der Standard (Austria), and others. Mallat appeared in leading television interviews, including the BBC Hardtalk, CNN Larry King, Kalam al-Nas (LBCI), transcript in English hereArchived 2014-08-14 at the Wayback Machine , Niqtat Hiwar (al-'Arabiyya). A sample of the interviews and profiles was published in A Compelling Presidency: The Mallat Campaign in World News, Beirut, April 2006.
↑ Shadia Awwad (23 February 2006). "Mallat muhandis hamlat isqat lahhud (Mallat is the architect of the deposition of Lahud)". Ukaz. Saudi Arabia.
↑ Plan presented at the Bristol meeting of the full leadership of the March 14 coalition on February 16, 2006. Details in "al-'amaliyya al-dusturiyya (the constitutional process)", in Presidential Talks, 188-9. See in English Mallat, Here's how to get rid of Emile Lahoud[permanent dead link], The Daily Star, 4 March 2006
↑ Mallat, "31 May 2006:[Coming] War announced", Speech at Saint-Joseph's University,31 May 2006, in Presidential Talks, pp. 21-27.
↑ See under Publications and Books from the presidential campaign
↑ 'Comparative law and the Islamic (Middle Eastern) legal culture', in Mathias Reimann and Reinhard Zimmermann eds., Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, OUP, 2006, 609-639; 'Islam and the constitutional order', in Michel Rosenfeld and Andras Sajo eds, Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, Oxford University Press, 2012, 1287-1303 (Also in Japanese, published 2011 tr. and ed. Makoto Mizutani); Emtries 'Islamic Law in Arab Countries', 'Commercial Law: Islamic Law (Modern)', 'Contract: Contracts and Unilateral Acts in Islamic Law ', 'International Law: Islamic Public Law', 'Constitutional Law: Constitutions and Constitutional Law in Islamic Law: Overview and The Arab Countries', in Stanley Katz general ed., Baber Johansen, ME and Islam ed., The Encyclopedia of Legal History, Oxford UP 2009; 'Attorney', entry in Encyclopaedia of Islam 3d ed., 2008; 'Islamic Legal Theory- Introducing usul al-fiqh', entry in IVR Encyclopaedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law, 2005; 'Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr', 'Iraq', 'Contracts', entries in Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World, Oxford University Press, 1995.
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