Features of Constitution1
|Is there a constitution?||Yes|
|Does the constitution provide for freedom of religion?||Yes|
|Last Amended||As of 5/11/2011, last amendment was made in 2000|
|Source||International Constitutional Law (ICL)|
|Translation||Source is an English translation|
|Current as of||1999 (later amendment not included)|
Constitution Excerpts (clauses that reference religion)2
Article 3 [Islam]
(1) The religion of the President of the Republic has to be Islam.
(2) Islamic jurisprudence is a main source of legislation.
Article 7 [Oath]
The constitutional oath is as follows:
"I swear by God the Almighty to sincerely preserve the republican, democratic, and popular system, respect the constitution and the laws, watch over the interests of the people and the security of the homeland, and work and struggle for the realization of the Arab nation's aims of unity, freedom, and socialism."
Article 35 [Religion]
(1) The freedom of faith is guaranteed. The state respects all religions.
(2) The state guarantees the freedom to hold any religious rites, provided they do not disturb the public order.
1. Data under the "Features of Constitution" heading are drawn from coding of the U.S. State Department's 2008 International Religious Freedom Reports conducted by researchers at the Association of Religion Data Archives. The article by Brian Grim and Roger Finke describes the coding of the International Religious Freedom reports. A dataset with these and the other international measures highlighted on the country pages can be downloaded from this website. Used with permission.
2. The constitutional excerpts shown above are reproduced from the websites given in the "Source" field; the links to these websites were active as of May 2011. Where the constitutional text shown on these websites was provided in a language other than English, this text was translated to English by ARDA staff with assistance from web-based translation utilities such as Google Translate and Yahoo! Babel Fish. Constitutional text was converted to American English where applicable. Constitutional clauses were judged to contain religious content based largely on the standards used in the construction of the Religion and State Constitutions Dataset collected by Jonathan Fox. Emphases were added to the text by ARDA staff to highlight religious content in articles that also contain content that does not pertain to matters of religion. The data on this page were correct to the best of the knowledge of the ARDA as of the date listed in the "Current as of" field shown above. Please contact us at email@example.com if you are aware of any incorrect information provided on this page.