ABSTRACT
In his novel Maze of Justice, Tawfik al-Hakim depicts with rather black humor the frustrations involved in subjecting a backwater Egyptian village to the new laws and procedures of the “modernizing” state. Because the new laws have no connection to local social reality, they are meaningless and incomprehensible to the people they are meant to regulate; the village prosecutor alone stands in both camps and recognizes the futility of his task. Law and administration are essential powers of the state, but their exercise outside of a meaningful social context is, Hakim suggests, worthless. It is notable that the problem is not one of the intractability of tradition but the disconnection between two different bases of authority; Hakim is as critical of the mindless bureaucracy of the new system as of the subjective and socially-variable justice of the old one. The novel points out a vital issue in the establishment of state legal systems: the manner and degree of their relevance to the sociocultural context. The law’s basis of authority must, if the state is to enjoy legitimacy, be comprehensible to and respected by the people. To this end, states facing legitimacy issues take conscious steps to reconcile the nature of authority with perceived social demands.
