Arbitration, the principal form of international dispute resolution, has a long and often troubled history in the Islamic world. Shortly after the founding of Islam, the Treaty of Medina of 622 A.D. (a security pact among the city's Muslims, non-Muslim Arabs, and Jews) called for arbitration of any disputes by the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, the Prophet himself resorted to arbitration in his conflict with the tribe of Banu Qurayza. Muslim rulers subsequently followed his example, notably in the disastrous arbitration between Muawiyah (the governor of Syria) and the Caliph Ali (the Prophet's son-in-law) in 659 A.D. to determine the succession to the Caliphate. Ali's refusal to accept the arbitrators' ruling in favor of Muawiyah made permanent Islam's enduring split into the Shiite and Sunni branches. Arbitration between Islamic states or their nationals and non-Islamic parties-that is, truly international arbitration-has followed a similarly perilous course. Thus, although Bahrain, for example, was an international commercial-arbitration center long before Paris and London, the modem era of international arbitration (dating from the late nineteenth century, but particularly since World War II) has been for the Islamic world a "roller coaster" experience. In much of that region, international arbitration has long been viewed skeptically, if not with hostility. In this modern era, international arbitration as it relates to the Islamic world has already passed through two phases and is well into a third. Each phase reflects precisely the power equation in place at the time between Islamic states that are sources of petroleum and the foreign developers and off-takers of those resources. Each is also bound up with closely related developments in, and developing nations' broader attempts to shape, international law relating to compensation for expropriation. Finally, each marks the evolution of the relationship between the domestic law of Islamic states and international law.
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