Policies for the Preservation of Built Heritage in Islamic Contexts

The aim of this chapter is to compare Islamic Sharī’a law with international policies governing cultural heritage preservation, and to investigate current, related laws in Qatar as a case study for the Middle Eastern region. The author presents research carried out within the Materiality and Preservation in Islamic Contexts project, in which he examined governing models of cultural heritage preservation by reviewing Islamic classical literature and by analysing Qatar’s Law on Antiquities according to six criteria of policy efficiency described by Daniel Mazmanian and Paul Sabatier (1983). Evaluating these essential conditions helps determine whether a policy is being effectively implemented, and whether it fulfils standards for the type of top-down policy-making procedures that are most common in Middle Eastern nations, including Qatar.