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Author: Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261445
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies. An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition. Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies.
Author: Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261445
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Get Book Here
Book Description
What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies. An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition. Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies.
Author: Julia Stephens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107173914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.
Author: Arskal Salim
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082483237X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Challenging the Secular State examines Muslim efforts to incorporate shari’a (religious law) into modern Indonesia’s legal system from the time of independence in 1945 to the present. The author argues that attempts to formally implement shari’a in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, have always been marked by tensions between the political aspirations of proponents and opponents of shari’a and by resistance from the national government. As a result, although pro-shari’a movements have made significant progress in recent years, shari’a remains tightly confined within Indonesia’s secular legal system. The author first places developments in Indonesia within a broad historical and geographic context, offering a provocative analysis of the Ottoman empire’s millet system and thoughtful comparisons of different approaches to pro-shari’a movements in other Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan). He then describes early aspirations for the formal implementation of shari’a in Indonesia in the context of modern understandings of religious law as conflicting with the idea of the nation-state. Later chapters explore the efforts of Islamic parties in Indonesia to include shari’a in national law. Salim offers a detailed analysis of debates over the constitution and possible amendments to it concerning the obligation of Indonesian Muslims to follow Islamic law. A study of the Zakat Law illustrates the complicated relationship between the religious duties of Muslim citizens and the nonreligious character of the modern nation-state. Chapters look at how Islamization has deepened with the enactment of the Zakat Law and demonstrate the incongruities that have emerged from its implementation. The efforts of local Muslims to apply shari’a in particular regions are also discussed. Attempts at the Islamization of laws in Aceh are especially significant because it is the only province in Indonesia that has been allowed to move toward a shari’a-based system. The book concludes with a review of the profound conflicts and tensions found in the motivations behind Islamization.
Author: Hussein Ali Agrama
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226010686
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.
Author: Jeff Redding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295747071
Category : Domestic relations
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
"Islamic law's relationship to secular governance is a fraught one in contemporary discussions. Whether from the perspective of Islamic law's advocates, secularism's partisans, or publics caught in the crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islam and secularism as antagonistic. Moreover, the relationship between Islamic law and secularism seems increasingly discordant, with recent developments in the United States (e.g., calls for "shari'a bans" in U.S. courts), Western Europe (such as legal limitations on headscarves and mosques), and the Arab Middle East (such as conflicts between secularist old-guards and Islamist revolutionaries) indicating that unsteady coexistences are transforming into outright hostilities. This book's exploration of an Indian non-state system of Muslim dispute resolution-formally known as the dar ul qaza system, but commonly referred to as a system of "Muslim courts" or "shariat courts"-challenges conventional narratives about the inevitable opposition between Islamic law and secular forms of governance, and the impossibility of their coexistence. Moreover, it demonstrates how secular law and governance in India does not and cannot work without the significant assistance of non-state Islamic legal actors. For example, the conciliation-oriented Indian family court system is insufficient for handling divorce petitions brought by Muslim women seeking to unilaterally disassociate from their Muslim husbands. This volume shows how in these situations and others, Indian state secularism needs the Islamic non-state-so much so that this intense need often erupts into a complicated set of love-hate politics towards India's Muslims"--
Author: Azzam Tamimi
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814782613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Western civilization tends to view secularism as a positive achievement. From this perspective, benefits of secularizing trends include the separation of church and state, the rule of law, and freedom from organized religion. In the Arab Middle East, however, Islamist intellectuals increasingly cite Western-inspired secularism as the source of the region's social dislocation and political instability. While secularism in the West led to the spread of democratic values, in the Muslim world it has been associated with dictatorship, the violation of human rights, and the abrogation of civil liberties. Islam and Secularism in the Middle East examines the origins and growth of the movement to abolish the secularizing reforms of the past century by creating a political order guided by Shariah law. Contributors explain the Islamic rejection of secularism as a failed Western Christian ideal and also discuss how secularization was pioneered by those who thought Muslims could only advance politically by emulating Western practices, including the renunciation of religion.
Author: Katherine Lemons
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501734784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls "spiritual healing"—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.
Author: Saba Mahmood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691153280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
Author: Talal Asad
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783098
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
“A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity. “A difficult if stunningly eloquent book, a response both elusive and forthright to the many shelves of ‘books on terrorism’ which this country’s trade publishers are rushing into print.” —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature “This wonderfully illuminating book should be read alongside the author’s Genealogies of Religion.” —Religion “One of the most interesting scholars of religious writing today.” —Christian Scholar’s Review “Asad’s brilliant study remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.” —The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
Author: Emilia Justyna Powell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190064633
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
"Islamic Law and International Law is a comprehensive examination of differences and similarities between the Islamic legal tradition and international law, especially in the context of dispute settlement. Sharia embraces a unique logic and culture of justice--based on nonconfrontational dispute resolution--as taught by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. This book explains how the creeds of Islamic dispute resolution shape the Islamic milieu's views of international law. Is the Islamic legal tradition ab initio incompatible with international law, and how do states of the Islamic milieu view international courts, mediation, and arbitration? Islamic law constitutes an important part of the domestic legal system in many states of the Islamic milieu--Islamic law states--displacing secular law in state governance and affecting these states' contemporary international dealings. The book analyzes constitutional and subconstitutional laws in Islamic law states. The answer to the "Islamic law-international law nexus puzzle" lies in the diversity of how secular laws and religious laws fuse in domestic legal systems across the Islamic milieu. These states are not Islamic to the same degree or in the same way. Thus, different international conflict management methods appeal to different states, depending on each one's domestic legal system. The main claim of the book is that in many instances the Islamic legal tradition points in one direction while Western-based, secularized international law points in another direction. This conflict is partially softened by the reality that the Islamic legal tradition itself has elements fundamentally compatible with modern international law. Islamic legal tradition, international law, sharia settlement, peaceful dispute resolution"--
