In Modern Egypt, after the 1923 Constitution was enacted, there was the problem of power division over “religion” between the Parliament and the King because Article 153 of the 1923 Constitution stipulated the King’s supreme authority over religious matters. In 1927, Law No. 15 of 1927 was passed to limit such power of the King. This paper traces the debates in the Parliament leading up to the passage of the 1927 Law, and attempts to clarify the thoughts of constitutionalists 23 within the Parliament who sought to realize its passage. They recognized that Islam did not distinguish between secular and religious matters, and was connected to the people entirely. The sovereignty of the people, which was closely linked to Islam, was the basis of Parliamentary power, which therefore must supervise religious matters for the benefit of the people. This was the background to the enactment of the 1927 law. In other words, they successfully modified the monopoly of power over religious matters held by the King by refusing to be reduced to a purely secular power.

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This paper aims to reconsider “reforms” allegedly carried out in Syria by Muhammad Ali’s government in the 1830s, through the analysis of the structure of financial administration established under his rule. First, this paper clarifies the outline of the financial administration structure in Syria before the Egyptian rule, and then examines the principal departments and individuals who were significantly concerned with financial administration in Syria under the Egyptian rule using archival documents held in the National Archives of Egypt. By clarifying the role and position of each department and individual in the financial administration, and their inter-relationship, this paper presents the overall structure of the financial administration in Syria under Egyptian rule. Following these findings, the paper clarifies that while Muhammad Ali’s government did indeed change the structure of the financial administration in Syria by expanding and centralizing its financial bureau, it broadly followed the basic structure of the existing financial administration and did not really introduce an entirely new scheme. Considering the fact that Muhammad Ali’s government approached financial administration, the cornerstone of governance, largely by maintaining the status quo while making partial changes, such an approach was not limited to the sphere of financial administration, but was widely practiced in Syria by Muhammad Ali’s government, and was also a characteristic of its “reforms” in Syria.

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On May 1, 2017, Ḥamās published “A Document of General Principles and Policies” (the new Charter). This article compares this document with “The Charter of Ḥamās” (the old Charter), issued in August 1988, to reveal the shift in logic from the old Charter to the new one and to elucidate their “flexibility.” While an earlier study found the old Charter to be ideologically “flexible,” it was in fact indirect and a kind of a “loophole.” This article addresses six issues in its analysis of the new Charter: (i) the reliance on logic other than the traditional Islamic legal system, such as “international law” and “human rights”; (ii) the decline of Islamic elements, as exemplified by the dramatic decline in the number of times the word “Allāh” appears, the complete absence of quotations from the Qur’ān, and the absence of mention of the Muslim Brotherhood; (iii) the place of Islam in logic (in particular, no longer employing causality to assign blame to the absence of Islam); (iv) the change of the meaning of jihād and the emphasis on its legitimacy; (v) the distinction between “Jews” and “Zionists”; and (vi) the disappearance of the “waqf” and the possibility of recognizing the State of Israel. To conclude the analysis of this article, there has been a shift in logic from the old Charter to the new one and the new one brings out Ḥamās’s “direct flexibility.”

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