Governing under Necessity in Muslim-majority States and the Constitutional Limits of Emergency Executive Power

Abstract

Emergency powers were examined through a comparative qualitative institutional analysis of Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Tunisia. The study asked how emergency authority was activated, supervised, and terminated, and whether Islamic public-law reasoning could clarify the limits of exceptional executive power without being treated as an empirical variable. Constitutional texts, emergency legislation, selected judicial and executive materials, and country-specific scholarship were analysed through doctrinal research and structured focused comparison. The findings showed that the four systems differed most sharply in the institutional life cycle of emergency power. Indonesia displayed fragmented controls, Pakistan layered parliamentary procedures, Egypt a fixed temporal structure, and Tunisia a cause-based exit rule centered more heavily on presidential judgment. No consistent relationship was found between explicit Islamic constitutional language and the density of formal emergency constraints. The article therefore developed a Constrained Necessity Framework and the concept of deactivation asymmetry to explain how emergency authority could remain bounded after its initial activation.