The Road, However Long
In the heart of London there is a city within the city.
The City of London is not merely the financial district the world knows, but an old order of governance, commerce and law that has kept its institutions across centuries. Among the oldest is the office of the Sheriffs — the City’s two Sheriffs, elected each year, tied to the Lord Mayor, to the courts at the Old Bailey, and to the keeping of the rule of law.
This week I attended their ceremony at Guildhall, the City’s historic seat. There was something of old England in the scene: the robes, the ritual, the titles, and a hall that has watched centuries of power, trade and law.
But what occupied me was not the age of the institution. It was the modernity of its function.
And it struck me that the greatest technology Britain exported to the world may not have been a machine.
It may have been the Common Law, and the rule of law it helped entrench.
That two people who share neither country nor language can write a contract, and then rest assured that behind the paper stands an independent judge, a settled rule, and an institution that need not reinvent its legitimacy every morning — this is not a legal matter alone.
It is a technology of trust.
And in the age of artificial intelligence, trust may become scarcer than knowledge itself.
I left Guildhall thinking about China, and about Xi’an in particular.
Today I consider it not only as ancient Chang’an, one of the great cities of the Silk Road, but as a Chinese city with a deep Islamic presence, searching for its place along the world’s new routes.
In Xi’an there is an international commercial court under the Supreme People’s Court, and around it an expanding order that binds litigation to arbitration, mediation and the legal services of cross-border trade.
I have sat on its mediation and arbitral panels whose work extends into Central Asia, Africa and the Chinese provinces. From that vantage, Xi’an appears as a contemporary question: how can a city attract a legal architecture capable of resolving disputes and opening channels of trust and exchange with the Arabian Peninsula?
For the new route does not carry silk and spices.
It carries energy, data, capital and knowledge.
There I understood that it is not enough for a route to be a route.
It must become a road.
And from there my thoughts returned to Makkah.
On the seventh of August, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Makkah Mutual Defence Agreement, on the principle that an armed attack on one of them is an attack on all.
But the more important question for me is not only: how is the region protected?
It is: what do we do with the strategic depth that protection creates?
For there is a difference between an alliance that deters danger and an order that can live on after it.
Strategic depth is not measured by the range of a weapon or the breadth of geography alone. There is another depth, made by institutions: law that can be trusted, trade that can cross crises, and mediation and arbitration that keep a commercial dispute from becoming a political enmity.
Here Guildhall meets Xi’an, and Xi’an meets Makkah.
London reminds us that commerce needs the rule of law.
Xi’an reminds us that law needs a route.
Makkah places the hardest question before us: can the power that protects a route become, in time, an order that makes the route worth travelling?
Security protects the route, but it does not make the road.
For the road is not the shortest distance between two states, nor an agreement signed when danger sharpens. It is a long capacity to join power to law, interest to trust, and geography to institution.
And in an age when everyone is searching for the shortest way to the future, the civilisational question worthier of us may be a different one:
Which route can endure when power changes?
The answer, I believe, is the route that carries an order within it, as London carries a city within its heart.
The road is not diminished by its length, if we know where it leads.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and is tested in the world.
Explanatory note: I use the term «الكومن لو» (Common Law) here rather than its common Arabic rendering «القانون العام», because the latter denotes Public Law in Arabic legal usage, which is a different meaning. The Common Law is the legal tradition that took shape in England through adjudication, precedent and practice, whereas the Rule of Law is a broader principle resting on the subjection of ruler and ruled alike to the law. What concerns us here is the relation between them: how a legal tradition, across centuries of adjudication and practice, helped turn the rule of law from a principle into an institution, and from an institution into trust capable of crossing borders.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.