goal of running a society entirely based on Islamic principles. Inevitably the
Iranian Revolution played a major part in this impetus towards application to
states’ legal codes, and the work of the religious-legal experts who ran the
Iranian state has been crucial in the development of a fully embracing Islamic
law. The two most important branches of this development have also been the
intellectually and politically most challenging. On one hand what Western
countries would call public law, orconstitutional law, had to be developed if
the goal of truly Islamic states was to be achieved.Islam, however, has never
recognized the autonomy of the state from general moral and religious rule as
Western countries have, and the idea of a public law governing individual and
state interactions separately from the law governing individual to individual
relations is necessarily difficult to establish. It would have been much the same
situation had Western European society decided to make itself an entirely
Roman Catholic society to be governed completely by canon law. The other
area has been the need to develop a working commercial law.
This second area of banking and investment law has been even more
complicated in some ways, because the heart of banking and investment is
the process of raising funds by charging interest on loans. Even more vehe-
mently than in medieval canon law, usury is forbidden by Shari‘a, thus the
development of laws allowing a banking sector which can cope with Western
economic pressures has been a considerable challenge.
Single-Party Systems
A single-party system is usually one where there is an actual constitutional ban,
or an effectively enforced unofficial ban, on the number of parties allowed to
stand in elections. Alternatively, there may not even be elections at all, and the
party is deemed permanently to be in power. However, single-party systems
often in fact hide considerable degrees of internal conflict, with power
struggles capable of resulting in major changes of policy within the party. In
other cases legal alternative parties may be tolerated by the ruling party, but
have no chance of election, or several theoretically separate parties be welded
into one tightly-controlled organization. The latter was the case in communist
East Germany, for example, while in Mexico the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional, in office from 1929–2000, took care to arrange the election of a
token handful of members from opposition parties to give a safety valve to
public feelings, until elections began to become more genuinely democratic in
the 1980s. Finally, effective single-party systems can come about by the sheer
preponderance of public opinion in some areas. Until recently many of the
southern states in the USA were effectively single-party systems because there
was absolutely no chance of a representative of the Republican Party
winning office. In such a situation theprimaryof theDemocratic Party,
Single-Party Systems