Saturday 11 October 2008

sitting in the good ole library

Yet again! Ack! Just seen the inside of this too much recently its affecting my mood and making me irritatable. I dislike things left unfinished if I know it requires completion it just bugs me and sticks at the back of my head until I hand it in on Friday.

I now have 53 pages of notes and a word count of 0 actually written, but now I'm done all my colour coding and page numbering I really have nothing to do but to put it together so wish me luck on how that goes. I got terrible marks for my modern studies and english dissertations in 6th year (so what if i was younger and less mature and paying it less attn) which kind of hangs over my head when I think about this one being even longer. I also don't want to disappoint Hallaq because he was an incredibly good professor and really inspired me and many others to do well! I have never heard anyone like him speak to me before. He said to me he would never have guessed I was only undergrad at 20 years in a class full of LLM students so I dont want to disappoint him - little does he know that it probably petrifies me more to know that! Its been some incredibly interesting research - I had originally been looking just at the similarities between the waqf and trust law of england, but I'm finding that so many areas of Shariah and the common law are the same and that even the teaching methods seems to have originated in Baghdad between the 7th and 12th century! I also seem to have discovered that I love history which I had no idea about - maybe it is just because I stood at a point where I was utterly clueless about the Middle Ages...

Me mum and dad are away to Nepal tomorrow so I hope you two have fun and stay safe and stay away from Yeti airlines!! Im looking forward to home in December and seeing everyone again - I got a lovely message from Aisling and life goes on in Edinburgh much as it ever did :) everyone seems to be realising that honors is evil much as I am out here with the amount of work that we get, but I do really appreciate the courses that I have a choice of out here!

Yesterday we went to a talk by a guy who used to be the Singapore person on the UN and now works in making sure Singapore complies with International law. What I and most others took away from that is just Singapore atypical really! Anything he couldn't answer was "the Ministry" and to be honest it wasn't really fair to ask him why Singapore felt that cost and benefit analysis in implementing human rights treaties was more important than their guiding principles. Singapore's attitude is that if they don't think they can live up to the standards of a treaty (or don't want to - its much cheaper to just kill someone and/or cane them than put them in jail for 6 months) they put a reservation in on all the articles they wont manage - which in the case of a human rights treaty is a whole lot. I would rather they were held accountable than worry about damage to their reputation politically but Singapore is all about practical measures and disliking being criticised. He praised the fact that they have a small government here and its easy to speak to each other and agree - I didnt like to point out the fact that its because they are all from the same party and there is no such thing as opposition (outwith or within the party!) so I just said it under my breath.

So now I had better start writing the body of this shizzle I guess :)

wish me luck!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

For similarity between the waqf and the English trust, see Verbit, The Origins of the Trust available on Amazon.com, etc.

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