Xeer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeer

by mazsa • 12 years ago

246 117 12 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

noiv• 12 years ago

Very interesting. Wasn't aware of alternatives to the western legal system hundreds of years old and actually widely accepted.

contulluipeste2• 12 years ago

As I see it, the western legal system which relies on written analytical laws appears indeed as an "alternative", but western judges do for example make use of judicial precedents too. This system is based on a set of principles that have just a lesser use in western legal system.

LyndsySimon5• 12 years ago

You might also be interested in Lex Mercatoria. It's a system of common law used between merchants in medievil Europe for dispute resolution, particularly in a time when the largest truly effective government was at the level of the nation-state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria

I really wish I had more time and energy to devote to the study of polycentric law. It's something I feel very strongly about, and where I know enough to realize my understanding is incomplete :)

praxeologist7• 12 years ago

Xeer is one example of the success of private, customary and polycentric law. The Lex Mercatoria as the other poster noted is one more example.

Medieval Iceland: http://mises.org/daily/1121

and Ireland (page 3): https://mises.org/journals/lf/1971/1971_04.pdf

People are waxing about the superiority of "British common law" while its roots are a system of the Anglo-Saxons extremely similar to the Xeer.

cup• 12 years ago

I must admit I was confused to see xeer being posted to HN. Its interesting to contemplate the unique history of Somalia and the Somali people and how it fits into the greater African jigsaw puzzle.

I think the article is slightly misinformed however, the Sharia legal and judicial instrument which was adopted by the Somali people after the growth of the Muslim faith in the region was another system of justice and social order that arrived well before attempted European colonisation.

On a tangent, interesting things are happening with the Somali federal government now with respect to the telecommunications industry. Not only does Somalia now have its own top down domain (.so) but fiber optic lines are slowly being rolled out in the capital.

I find it ironic to think that in Australia the government is singing praises for copper network lines (after repealing the NBN) yet war torn anarchic Somali is pushing in the other direction. Somalia and Africas future really does look interesting.

mtkd• 12 years ago

I find articles like this quite useful for developing my thoughts on algorithms I use - my first reaction when reading was 'could this be applicable to machine learning?'.

aet2• 12 years ago

and, is it?

dfc14• 12 years ago

Why is it ironic that Australia is singing the praises of copper? Can you imagine anyone thinking it would be a good idea to hang dollar bills from wooden poles in a war torn country? After looking at Australia and Somalia's history, geography and current economic development why would anyone think what is good for one country would necessarily work for the other.

shiven• 12 years ago

Perhaps you have some facts to support the Australian argument; but generally older tech is supported and propped up by entrenched interests, focused on their own profit margins, public good be damned.

buyx4• 12 years ago

Starting off a low base means that African countries could protentially leapfrog developed countries technologically, at least. I remember similar points being made in the 1990s when we adopted "cutting-edge" (at the time) GSM in South Africa, because there were no entrenched network interests.

As an aside, in South Africa, there's a palpable sense of anxiety in the business press that we could be, in a few decades, overtaken by our neighbours to the north. We have entrenched interests, and inflexible and poorly educated labour force and a business world that has historically been dominated by monopolists.

VLM3• 12 years ago

Speaking of geography, .au has at least some copper mines, and they're a reasonably advanced nation, so they can likely supply locally made copper cables, which might be more economic than shipping fiber and fiber gear from "somewhere" to .au. Maybe it would be more economical to export large diameter power cables to "somewhere" while importing fiber, but its not a total no-brainer and requires at least some research to determine the optimum.

.so doesn't have much for resources other than pirates and hungry people, so if they're going to have to import everything, may as well be the new stuff.

Another way to look at .au vs .so is .au is very sparsely populated other than coasts so "most people" will likely end up using wireless for everything, and copper only in unusual areas, and perhaps not so in .so where a very substantial fiber investment might be required to pepper the entire country with wireless towers.

Inherently fiber "should be" much cheaper tech that copper, but due to existing infrastructure and historical economic conditions, its currently applied the other way around, so expensive fiber is for big cities and cell towers, but copper is for providing DSL to that cattle ranch 100 miles from civilization. If .so only serves the rich in the big cities, they have no use for copper to feed the rural poor who won't be getting service, as a theoretical example.

11001• 12 years ago

I find it ironic to think that in Australia the government is singing praises for copper network lines [...] yet war torn anarchic Somalia is pushing in the other direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging

dfc14• 12 years ago

Dont forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_theft

VLM3• 12 years ago

"I must admit I was confused to see xeer being posted to HN."

Social media / web blog / MMORPG code of conduct / Karma scheme / online digital currency / standards of behavior all belong here?

If, today, on eveonline, or any other mmorpg, enough people wanted to roll a system out for conflict resolution, well, here's a historical system thats known to work and be stable and well documented, or documented well enough anyway. It might actually transplant successfully.

Much as most social media is essentially workforce automation for grade school girl playground scale interpersonal relations, there are obvious startup opportunities to provide distributed worldwide mediation services using proven stable and successful historical techniques with a thin patina of CRUD web app and mobile phone data harvesting app smeared over it. Although this paragraph is hyper sarcastic its also serious, there are obvious startup opportunities for a proven stable and workable mediation system. Other than having problems educating the participants, I see no particular reason it couldn't scale worldwide for mediation. MaaS is Mediation as a Service? I suppose the startup would base their support call center in .so for obvious reasons? Its a very interesting idea and I'm almost sorry to state it publicly because I'd almost want to roll it out myself.

notahacker2• 12 years ago

If I were to start a private mediation system in the West I'd probably want my brand image associated more with sophisticated private mediation systems that already help resolve disputes within Western law, and less towards village elders deciding the level of blood money a clan must pay to forestall future family feuds

LyndsySimon5• 12 years ago

Interestingly, my understanding is that Somalia also has a fairly ubiqutious mobile payments system, which operates over SMS.

It's not perfect - it seems to rely on individual companies to remain honest, for instance - but one can go to a local market and add funds to their account with cash, then send those funds to others via a text message.

Seeing that such a system has still yet to take off in many industrialized countries, I find that pretty amazing :)

zhemao• 12 years ago

I think you are thinking of M-PESA, which is run by Kenyan and Tanzanian mobile providers Safaricom and Vodacom.

elwell• 12 years ago

I must admit I was confused to see xeer being posted to HN

(from wikipedia) > It is an example of how customary law works within a stateless society

Anything that uses the word "stateless" is guaranteed to make it to the front page of HN, an immutable conglomeration of immutability fanatics.

dr_faustus• 12 years ago

And everybody knows: Somalia is paradise! You can even become a pirate! Arrrrrr!

vacri7• 12 years ago

Several scholars have noted that even though Xeer may be centuries old, it has the potential to serve as the legal system of a modern, well-functioning economy.

This makes no sense, given the remainder of the article, as a modern, well-functioning economy (of which Somalia certainly does not have one) requires diversity. Xeer relies heavily on ingrained cultural norms, and is discriminatory against minorities and women. Lack of impartiality is also a question, given that you are assigned a judge at birth.

It might work well in Somalia, but I can't see what is described as being translatable elsewhere. There are some elements that aren't Xeer-specific (like reducing focus on punitive measures), but as a whole, I can't see it working somewhere else that doesn't have the same social structure.

peteretep• 12 years ago

Well, additionally it takes them a relatively long time in the article to make the connection to common law, which is also "discovered".

gbog5• 12 years ago

I agree that the article makes no sense, but I think that modern society "requires diversity" might be some kind of party line in the West and might be no fully true. An example of successful society that is not highly "diverse" is China. (Well China certainly is and was diverse, but not as much as current Western societies).

Agathos• 12 years ago

And before China you had Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

vacri7• 12 years ago

'Economy', not 'society'. China has quite a diverse economy.

frozenport3• 12 years ago

>It might work well in Somalia

Nope. Have you seen Somalia?

hythloday2• 12 years ago

Have you? I lived there from 1988-1991, and I can assure you that Xeer is a reasonable framework for a modern society.

disputin• 12 years ago

"Court procedure..... In a murder case, the offender flees to a safe place – including outside the country – to avoid prosecution or execution "Qisaas." "

616c5• 12 years ago

I also find the name somewhat ironic.

Xeer clearly comes from خير, or khayr, which is Arabic for good. It is good, but in the higher moralistic and religious sense in addition to the normal sense. So I wonder if it goes back to original interaction with the Arabs, 7th century as noted or prior. The general idea, consensus-based law as I see it, seems similar on the basic principle in Islam to Ijma'[0], or consensus-based formation of jurisprudence. There are varying views, but that idea is that Islamic law (despite outside views of it) is not controlled by one but must be agreed upon by popular approval of jurisprudence scholars (of course this is loosely defined, but what can you do).

Xeer is definitely from the Arabic, as are many loanwords from Somali (as an Arabic speaker, who sat in linguistics courses where Somali speakers presented, I could be wrong). So I am not sure where the "no foreign loanwords" comment in the Wikipedia article came from.

Then again, maybe I am just reading to much into this name/book cover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijma

dfc14• 12 years ago

You "also find the name ironic?" Who else found the name ironic? And what is the irony? I have reread your comment three times now and can not identify any irony.

616c5• 12 years ago

I get into it later in my comment: it must be an original concept because no loan words are used in the Somali legal terminology, I point out that might not be true.

athesyn• 12 years ago

How do you figure? They seem phonetically similar because both Somali and Arabic are Afro-Asiatic languages. We already use khayr in daily speech, and incorporated Arabic words are almost always equal to the original Arabic word.

616c5• 12 years ago

I also use the word sugar and safari in English. The origins of both these words are well-attested.

I know they are both Afro-Asiatic languages, but on different ends of the spectrum (Arabic is a not Cushitic language). It could be an original word, but I thought it was interesting coincidence. I only assume it is one because, as I said, because I did coursework in college and Somali speakers did gloss examples for us and I was surprised at how Arabic-heavy some vocab was. This does not make me an expert on the topic, and I would admit I know not enough of Somali to say anything definitive.

I just wrote what came to my head. Somali is very interesting to me, but I could not find any good etymology resources online.

genieyclo2• 12 years ago

Xeer != khayr. X in Somali is the letter ح not خ. Has nothing to do with Arabic.

Xeer has existed for a long time, and probably longer than Islam has since there's similar systems of communal law and arbitration in neighboring communities like Gadaa that can be traced back to the pre-Islamic era.

616c5• 12 years ago

Oh oh oh. Now I look like an ass. When I read the Wikipedia article, I thought the transcription meant x->خ, but I guess you show why one must, like a programmer, continue to use IPA consistently or forget only to make very embarrassing public mistakes.

And now to come full circle, the root structure for xeer in Arabic means confusion. Should have seen that one coming. Haha.

EDIT: Do you have resources on Xeer and similar practices with Gaada? I have some friends who would be very interested in these topics.

gbog5• 12 years ago

There is this angle that says that natural laws are good, better than "artificial" laws. It seems trendy nowadays and is emphasised in the article.

But another angle, that seem to describe more closely the long term evolution and progress of human societies, is that laws and ethics have been slowly built by human societies against the law of nature. The direst way to express this is that in a natural environment, the weak and the disabled are left aside and die quickly, which we humans have decided to try hard to avoid.

So maybe a softer, more informal, "stateless" society like this Xeer could be valuable. But if it was, it would be because it would better protect us from the law of nature.

contulluipeste2• 12 years ago

Aside from the law of nature, I remarked the use of precedents as a co-basis for juridical mediation. Although this is something used all over the world outside Somalia (on a secondary role and usually only in an informal manner), its interesting to know it to work somewhere in real-life as a primary law principle.

logicchains3• 12 years ago

in a natural environment, the weak and the disabled are left aside and die quickly

This simply isn't true[1]. Humans evolved feelings like compassion because such cooperation and caring was beneficial to our survival. These emotions exist outside of any deliberate human decision making or social planning. Even monkeys have evolved forms of altruistic behaviour[2]. 'Ethics' in the sense of empathy and compassionate behaviour is hence just as much a part of the 'law of nature' as the more violent behaviours associated with it.

1.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2864937/

2. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/6-amazing-way...

humanrebar• 12 years ago

Humans evolved feelings like compassion because such cooperation and caring was beneficial to our survival.

That's a plausible hypothesis, but considering that it cannot be proven or disproven, it is an ultimately uninteresting one. gbog was talking about social evolution, which is a topic of social sciences. On second thought, perhaps reclassifying evolutionary psychology as a social science would be in order.

gbog5• 12 years ago

Even monkeys have evolved forms of altruistic behaviour

I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this kind of point. Ok, maybe by looking very closely, one could find traces of altruistic behaviors in monkey societies, but this cannot count as an argument against the amorality of Nature. Because it would mean to take the exception for the normality. Any unskewed view on natural behavior in animals is just saying the plain obvious: animals do not care at all if they inflict pain to other animals or kill them, except for their offspring. This is the norm, the natural way. You can count the exceptions, it will not change the norm.

On the opposite, in human societies, it happens that some people do not care (do not feel anything) when they inflict pain on other beings, but this is the exception, not the norm. And this has been built very slowly against nature, by the process of civilization (in the good old "natural" times, most human did not care if people of other race or slaves were suffering).

So let's not forget that. Nature is beautiful, but it feels nothing, we feel for her.

jessriedel2• 12 years ago

You're mistaken. "Natural law" refers to intuitive ideas of right and wrong, which is the kind of law Hobbes appeals to in the state of nature. In other words, everyone the world agrees that Bob is in the wrong when he punches Alice and steals her shoes; it does not depend on a local legal system. In contrast, patents protections are arguably counter intuitive, and the feeling that they are just derives from a specific legal system and from the benefits they have for society.

Natural law is an orthogonal concept to the laws of nature (i.e. physics) and to the empirical consequences of stateless societies (e.g. property is often stolen from the weak).

gbog5• 12 years ago

Are you sure that the article and connex ideas (e.g. Rousseau) really have no flavor of "modern humans and their artificial life are evil, while the good old savages and their natural life were much better"? I would connect this trend to some parts of ecology, and I think it is wise to never forget that Mother Nature is "amoral". "She" do not care a bit if hundred of thousands of being suffer and die. We do, and we humans have built ourselves mostly against and despite of nature.

Another example: you can't really have tigers and humans living too close of each other. A part of the work of civilization process has been to kill tigers so to let human offspring live. As much as we may like tigers (so beautiful, and endangered!), we still should prefer humans, right?

neotrinity• 12 years ago

How is it different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_self-government_in_India#... ??

which has been practised from way before 7th century ?

[ The Tone of the question is curiosity and not a flame-bait please]

BugBrother2• 12 years ago

I was wondering about similarities to the old "ting" in Scandinavia, which regulated clan feuds, etc.

Afaik, some kind of laws are common in clan societies. E.g. blood price, mentioned in the wikipedia article, was common in historical clan societies. (Famously, in Sweden if you killed someone from "Småland" in "Götaland", it was free. :-) )

How different is Xeer?

LyndsySimon5• 12 years ago

I was wondering about similarities to the old "ting" in Scandinavia, which regulated clan feuds, etc.

Is this related to the "farthings" of the Icelandic Commonwealth?

Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth#Court_sy...

antirez• 12 years ago

That may seem strange, but in Europe there are places where a similar "juridical" system was used too, which is, in Sicily. It was common for Mafia bosses and other respected older people to act as third party in order to judge disputes between people.

genieyclo2• 12 years ago

There are lots of parallels between the mafia system and Somali clan society. You pay your regular dues (in Somali, "qaaraan") that could be spent on anything from helping a destitute clansman get healthcare or a funeral, or help fund a clan militia's war. In return, you're under the protection of the clan on a blood-for-blood basis, guaranteed support and safety when the need arises.

Just like the mafia system has it's downsides, so does the Somali system as evidenced by going on several decades of bloodshed now.

wmt• 12 years ago

That seems to parallel some other systems too where you pay the rulers a tax which gets used to fund stuff like healthcare or wars.

praxeologist7• 12 years ago

Just like the mafia system has it's downsides, so does the Somali system as evidenced by going on several decades of bloodshed now.

This is an incredibly ignorant statement. The source of bloodshed in Somalia is foreign governments via the UN/AMISOM and their largely Kenyan/Ethiopian troops trying to prop up a government in Mogadishu, as well as the foreign-funded al-Shabaab they fight. This is not some noble jihad for democracy, just various factions struggling for the benefits a monopoly backed by strong foreign powers will bring.

The political climate and level of violence in south and southwest Somalia is vastly different than the rest of the region. Beyond Galkayo, there is pretty much no war. In Puntland and Somaliland, Xeer and customary law trumps the weak governments of the autonomous regions.

You falsely equate Xeer to the mafia and where the Xeer legal order reigns there is peace in Somalia. A mafia system is identical to a state except a state has public acceptance of the hegemony. The Somali people want Xeer and not state rule. Even during the Barre regime they would not recognize decisions of state courts and would handle the bulk of disputes their own way and ignore state rulings.

The decades of bloodshed come from a minority group of western-educated democracy lovers and psychopath "warlords" who have been waging war on the Mogadishu area for the prize of UN recognition and the trough of foreign aid money it brings.

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

stateless society

Sounds to me like a nicer way of saying failed state, which is what Somalia is.

levosmetalo• 12 years ago

It's not a failed state since they never tried to build a "state" by the western definition of the word.

iand• 12 years ago

Why say failed state? Do you presume that all countries must have a state?

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

The alternative is anarchy. Communists like to say that anarchy would be happy rainbows and sharing, but the closest nations we have to it are mostly in Africa, and more resemble feudal warlords than a utopian society.

johnzim• 12 years ago

From a jurisprudential point of view it's interesting to see how it evolved - the law in England moved out of the church and Xeer appears to have been born out of the reigning power in Somalia (elders) and remained therein.

I'll take the English common law and equity any day of the week - flexible where it needs to be so it's capable of applying concepts of natural justice constrained by well established principle, while still providing vital certainty as to the law. This passage in the wikipedia article makes the legal scholar in me shiver:

"The lack of a central governing authority means that there is a slight variation in the interpretation of Xeer amongst different communities"

Dealing with conflict of laws without prejudicing parties in an international setting is hard enough: imagine having to pursue justice according to discrepancies between individual communities! Better have some cast-iron choice-of-law clauses in those trade agreements!

ianbicking• 12 years ago

There is an attempt to find a proper jurisdiction: "A case is always heard at the lowest level of the clan that is possible. This ranges from the qoys (nuclear family), up through the reer (closest relatives), jilib (first diya group), and laaf (sub-clan) to the qolo (clan)."

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (1881) page 1. In other words, the Anglo-American system of common law is a system that has developed by generalizing from particular cases as they come up, and not by thinking from the top down about what kind of rules would be ideal.

It's rich with deeper meaning that there are a number of comments here about the development of rules and laws as we comment on an article posted on Wikipedia. I am one of thousands of volunteer editors on Wikipedia (since May 2010) years after having been (1) an editor of a glossy monthly bilingual publication about a foreign country as an expatriate resident of that country, (2) an editor of a series of English-language trade magazines about manufactured products from that same country, and (3) a student-editor (usually the only kind of editor such a publication has) of a law review. I started editing Wikipedia as late as I did, years after Wikipedia was founded, because when I first heard about Wikipedia I thought its editorial policies are madness--and, sure enough, the articles that resulted from the original policy included a lot of cruft. As Wikipedia has continued in existence, it has not been able to continue an Ayn Rand anarchy of bullies but has gradually had to develop rules and procedures and (a little bit of) hierarchy and organization. Most of the articles on the topics I do the most of my professional research in are still LOUSY, and I have been interviewed twice by the Wikipedia Signpost in the last several months about what needs to be done to improve articles on Wikipedia for various WikiProjects. The article kindly submitted here illustrates the problem, with its incoherent presentation of facts and speculation from a mixture of good and poor sources.

I live among the largest Somali expatriate community in the world outside Somalia (Minneapolis and its suburbs--we can listen to Somali-language local radio here since the 1990s) and have a new client for my supplementary mathematics classes whose family is from Somalia. That country's internal conditions during my adult life have been HARSH, and I don't envy any Somali patriot's task in trying to build up a country with peace, stability, and justice for all Somali citizens. I do wish all Somalis well in adapted customary legal systems to the modern world.

javert3• 12 years ago

Ayn Rand anarchy of bullies

Ayn Rand has absolutely nothing to do with this, and you shouldn't use her name as a form of generic insult. That is just stupid.

Also, Ayn Rand wrote at length against anarchy, so your insult doesn't even make sense. She also wrote at length against the arbitrary use of force, which is what bullies use.

LyndsySimon5• 12 years ago

As an Anarcho-Capitalist who formerly considered himself an Objectivist, I agree.

Rand's Objectivism pretty much says that government is a necessary evil, then goes out of its way to try to put together a system that is minimally invasive. Rand herself hated self-described libertarians and anarchists.

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

You seem to be unaware that Jimbo Wales was an avowed Rand disciple when he set up Wikipedia. Her views of how societies should be organized were very much the model for how Wikipedia initially was organized.[1] (For once, a link to Wikipedia is probably the best I could do for sourcing this statement.) Mr. Wales may not have exactly the same point of view today as he had then, and FOR SURE he is quite interested in deepening ties between the Wikipedia editing community and actual expert scholars to further improve the encyclopedia's content quality, but as an editor in the trenches that is the editorial culture I encounter as I try to improve the encyclopedia. Wikipedia's editing culture is not a professional editing culture--I've been a professional editor, and I can tell the difference. It may be that Wikipedia's internal organization will have to change for the Wikimedia Foundation to meet its goals for article content quality.

Other commentary on the writings of Ayn Rand, who definitely has some of the most dedicated fans I have ever met, can be found in a famous blog post by John Rogers.[2] I invite all the participants here to read it and see what you think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Political_and_econ...

[2] http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

SamReidHughes2• 12 years ago

It's amazing how this off-topic rambling is at the top of the page when there are so many better posts below.

frandroid• 12 years ago

Posts gets voted on whether they're useful/interesting or not, not on topic or not. And then this post is on topic anyway, what with talking about how law develops, the relevancy of the article with actual experience in editing and the Somali community.

melloclello2• 12 years ago

I thought it was insightful and interesting!

simonebrunozzi• 12 years ago

Sam, tokenadult is by far my most favorite commenter on HN. In fact, I'm not alone. Huge karma. That is one reason. The other reason might be that a few people upvoted his comment, and that's why it's on top. Of course you might disagree with the ranking, but ranking is there to give us an idea of what the whole community thinks.

undersuit• 12 years ago

It's amazing how this off-topic rambling is at the top of the page when there are so many better posts below.

nighthawk24• 12 years ago

Gram Panchayat in Indian villages often meet under trees too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram_panchayat

fiatjaf4• 12 years ago

For people interested in common law and the problems of the State law system, I recommend the articles on the topic by John Hasnas:

THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm HAYEK, THE COMMON LAW, AND FLUID DRIVE: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/NYUFinal.pdf

praxeologist7• 12 years ago

Hasnas is good. Also consider Benson's Customary Law with Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description of a Modern System of Law and Order without State Coercion: http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_2.pdf

fiatjaf4• 12 years ago

Do you ever think about building a framework for injecting an anarchistic customary law into our statist society using cryptography and the Internet? Something like the bitcoin of law? I'm talking about something that could be applied to the real world today, not to a group of crypto-anarchy enthusiasts. I'm also not talking about smart contracts, as these need a legal structure to work and cannot build it themselves.

I'm seeking people interested in this subject to exchange ideas.

mcguire• 12 years ago

"People who have migrated to locations far removed from their homes can also find themselves without adequate representation at Xeer proceedings."

That kinda sounds like a problem.

notahacker2• 12 years ago

It's OK, there should be some relatives around to make a restorative payment of camels or wives. Unless they're from a particularly powerful clan, in which case they may be able to avoid paying the Diya even if they can't swing the outcome of the case.

Personally I find it quite odd that so many self-proclaimed libertarians are so favourably disposed towards what is essentially a system for punishing the collective for the actions of the individual.

anubiann00b• 12 years ago

This won't work for large societies (unfortunately).

Xeer

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