Three recent books focused on law, gender, and Islam not only make important individual contributions to the field of law and religion, but together, in their attention to issues of gender, sex, violence, and law, signal an important development in both this field and the field of Islamic studies. This state of the field essay examines Kecia Ali's revised and expanded edition of Sexual Ethics and Islam, Ayesha Chaudhry's Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition, and Hina Azam's Sexual Violation in Islamic Law. Individually and collectively, these works shed light on the way that societies use gender as a fundamental tool of social organization and hierarchy. While Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam focus mainly on the classical Sunni Islamic tradition, their insight has wider methodological import for the study of law and religion. Further, they illuminate the intellectual diversity within the Islamic tradition, both in the past and in the present. In doing so, they draw attention to the process of how the intellectual tradition is retrieved and appropriated in contemporary contexts. Finally, their work is historical and descriptive as well as normative: this kind of scholarship challenges the distinction in the study of religion between these two categories. Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam each places her observations and arguments about classical Sunni Islamic texts and traditions in productive conversation with ethical and legal questions that Muslims face today.

This essay summarizes crucial ways that society—in particular, the United States—has treated claims by individuals to be free of generally required duties because their convictions tell them that performing the duties is deeply wrong. Among the topics I address are how the Supreme Court decisions involving constitutional rights and organizational claims relate to this treatment, but my main focus is on what I see as the critical issues and what I believe to be the wise choices for addressing such claims. Without attempting an extensive account of all that has been written on claims of exemptions, I refer to some relatively recent books that can help one to understand what is at stake and what can be said in favor of competing positions. I also provide references to recent and forthcoming work of my own that explores claims of exemptions in greater depth.

This is a self-indulgent, and perforce idiosyncratic, excursus into some (but by no means all) of the vast body of literature that has been published in recent years touching on secularism and cultural heritage in Europe, surveyed from the vantage point of law and religion scholarship. It was commissioned by the Journal of Law and Religion as part of its ambitious project for sharply focused and widely angled snapshots of the state of the field at the present moment.1 And, for this English writer, with this particular topic, the moment could not be more propitious.

The last decade has seen the publication in North America of a plethora of academic books and articles about polygamy. The most important texts on the subject, however, are two court rulings evaluating the constitutionality of criminal prohibitions against the practice of polygamy. Informed by and in dialogue with this academic discourse, these courts arrived at dramatically different conclusions. In Reference re s. 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada, the Supreme Court of British Columbia determined that while Mormon fundamentalist polygamists had religious freedom rights under Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to practice this aspect of their bona fide religious faith, the government of Canada was justified in limiting this right under Section 1 of the Charter. Prohibiting polygamy was necessary, the court found, in order to prevent the real and substantial risk of harm that it posed to women and children.1 Conversely, in the United States, a trial-level court in Utah issued a summary judgment finding that a criminal prohibition against polygamous religious marriages violated the rights to freedom of religion under the First Amendment, and due process rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. This judgment focused on the state's duty to tolerate minority religious practices, while downplaying the potential risks of polygamy to practitioners and their children.2

Disputes over the nature, basis, and enforceability of human rights go back to early 1947, when the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) first began. Nor were the disputes limited to the drafting process. Intense arguments emerged among social scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, legal thinkers, and public figures around the world over the very idea of human rights, namely, the notion that human beings possess legally enforceable entitlements to certain protections and opportunities simply because of their common humanity.

Notoriously, natural law means many things to many people. Natural law is discussed quite differently in the fields of ethics, law, and theology; it is employed quite differently in the spheres of political rhetoric, churches, and academia; it has been used quite differently in the eras of ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the Enlightenment, and the postmodern West; and something akin to natural law appears, with quite different associations, in the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. In some contexts natural law refers to God's moral law. In other contexts natural law consists of norms that can be discerned solely through human reason. In still other contexts natural law describes rules that are naturally embedded in the physical world.

Not so very long ago, the idea of religious freedom enjoyed all the self-evident virtue of a Norman Rockwell painting. Sure, Americans disagreed about what it meant in practice, leaving their Supreme Court to hash out the details. Still, however Americans differed in their religious beliefs, they espoused religious freedom and insisted that it cannot be government's job to promote any one religious sect over others or coerce anyone's conscience in religious matters. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” thundered Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1943, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”1 For a time, this consensus seemed poised to embrace the entire world. When in November 1949 Eleanor Roosevelt proudly held up for public view a poster-size copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including its article on “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” one might have been forgiven for thinking that all the peoples of the earth were ready to follow her matronly instruction.2