The purpose of this paper is to discuss potential principles for interpersonal dispute resolution models within an Islamic context. Such a task requires an Islamic researcher to walk a fine line in order to avoid falling in one of two methodological traps. The first trap is to draw upon western literature on conflict analysis and resolution without sufficient consideration of whether and how that literature may be applied in an Islamic setting. The subtle assumptions underlying most of the conflict intervention models developed in the west have gone undetected, until recently. The other trap is to embark upon a review of the existing Islamic literature relevant to conflict. This approach leads directly to entrapment in circles of legalistic interpretations developed centuries ago, which lack the spirit of conflict resolution as a movement for social change and an interdisciplinary field of research.

From the onset, one must dispel the idea that addressing gender issues or referring to “women” and “woman” is marginal to larger considerations of civil society and current global dynamics. Double standards with regard to images and treatment of women are indicators of distorted visions of social justice. Without remorse, women are often consigned to a sub-category in the estimation and construction of the social order through which we acquire justice.

What I discuss here are some preliminary ideas about social justice. My vision of social justice is predicated upon two things: my personal experiences of inequities because of race, class and gender; and my search in the Islamic tradition, and more precisely, in the Qur'anic text, for a perspective on civil society which dispels the tendencies towards oppression and social injustice.

This article examines South Sudan's experiment in creating a secular state out of the ashes of the professedly Islamic republic from which it seceded in 2011. South Sudanese political actors presented secularism as a means of redeeming the nation from decades of religious excess in which the government conflated political imperative with theological ambition, claiming to save the nation from its woes through the unifying force of Islam. However, secularism as an alternative soteriology—one that contended that it is only through political nonalignment in regards to religion that the public could be saved from the problems that plagued its predecessor—quickly became an object of contention itself, read by many South Sudanese to be anything but neutral. This article interrogates the secular promise of mediating religious diversity through exploring the tensions that have arisen in its fulfillment at the birth of the world's newest republic.

Why is shariʿa the taboo of modern law? This article examines the “spread of halal” controversy in China as a window to assess how nativist public opinion influences state law and policy whereas state law is foreclosed to providing protection to rights provided for in shariʿa. Among Chinese Muslims (Hui), qingzhen (lit. “pure” plus “true”) or “halal” is the kernel of their localized shariʿa, and one that prohibits consuming pork. The symbol qingzhen has proliferated in the course of China's economic modernization such that it pervades the public sphere, creating anxiety among Han Chinese that Chinese society and government is becoming “Islamicized.” Hui fear that the profusion of qingzhen foments food insecurity and endangers truth in labeling. In response, they have sought greater protection for their diluted core symbol in national legislation—attempts which have only exacerbated Hui-Han relations. Based on observations from over seven years of field research and interviews with Hui legal entrepreneurs, and drawing from the anthropology of taboo, I explain the debate in China by taking the Hui idea of shariʿa as a taboo to reflexively think about how secular non-Muslim states regard shariʿa as the taboo of modern law.

The Evolution of Religious Freedom in the European Court of Human Rights

Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects religious freedom, looked for many decades as though it was going to be effectively a dead letter. The European Court of Human Rights (“the Court”) did not find a violation of Article 9 until the case of Kokkinakis v. Greece which was decided only seventeen years ago, in 1993. Even after that seminal decision, religious freedom cases were still relatively rare for several years; in 2001, there had been fewer than thirty Court cases on Article 9. However, in the last decade the case law has expanded significantly; and from 2001 to 2010 there have been more than sixty additional cases. Thus, in a relatively short period, the Court has been pushed to develop a jurisprudence of religious freedom to deal with increasingly complex and controversial cases. As the case law has multiplied and the issues have diversified, however, it has become clear that the Court has not yet developed a sufficiently coherent and principled approach to this area. So far, its approach has proved of very limited utility to individuals making claims of religious freedom.

This is not to suggest that the Court has played no role in the protection of religious freedom in Europe. Indeed, in recent years, it has arguably played an increasingly positive role, particularly in cases involving group religious rights. However, this jurisprudence has not translated into greater protection for religious individuals in many instances.

To say that authority is the cornerstone of any law or legal system is to state the obvious. Authority not only defines the law but in effect constitutes it formally and substantively. There can be no functioning law or legal system without an underlying structure of authority that may in turn derive from another power-based or authority-based substrate, such as a state. This much we take for granted.

Although it is commonplace for the Western lawyer or jurist to view the state as a body wielding and exercising legal authority, such a view is neither obvious nor normative for his Muslim counterpart, and even less obvious by far to the Muslim masses around the world. Yet, paradoxically, the great majority of today's Muslim countries run their legal systems on the operative—and very concrete—assumption that it is the state that produces legal authority. In other words, within the national body politic of each modern Muslim country there lies a source of legal power that presumably legitimizes and enforces both the public actions of the law and the provisions that govern the private sphere.

According to one study, between 1975 and 1995, an estimated one hundred seventy-two (172) children died after their parents rejected medical care on religious grounds. Of these children, one hundred forty (140) suffered conditions for which survival rates exceeded ninety percent, if there had been timely medical intervention; and eighteen more could have survived at a rate exceeding fifty percent. Parents belonging to five churches that practice faith or spiritual healing methods accounted for eighty-three percent of these child deaths: the Indiana-based Faith Assembly, Christian Science Church, Church of the First Born in the Western states, Faith Tabernacle of Philadelphia, and the End Time Ministry of South Dakota. This survey did not include the seventy-eight child deaths reported in Oregon from 1955-98 or the twelve deaths in Idaho between 1980-98, resulting from faith healing practices that occurred within the Oregon-based Followers of Christ Church; of the Oregon children, probably twenty-one could have lived if they had received medical treatment, according to reporters from The Oregonian.

Proponents of minority rights are calling for urgent measures to protect the Copts in Egypt, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, and the Baha'i in Iran to secure religious diversity, shield minority populations from discriminatory practices, and prevent the outbreak of religious violence. State governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and international tribunals promote religious liberalization as the antidote to the violence and discord that is often attributed to these divisions. Enshrined in international agreements and promoted by a small army of experts and authorities, legal protections for religious minorities are heralded as the solution to the challenges of living with social and religious diversity. This article examines how the complexities and ambivalences of ordinary religious belonging are translated and transformed through the process of becoming legalized and governmentalized. It documents the risks of adopting religion as a category to draw together individuals and communities as corporate bodies that are depicted as in need of legal protection to achieve their freedom. The argument is developed through an extended case study of the legal status of the Alevis in Turkey, a community and a category formally constituted as a single whole as part of the Turkish nation-building project. It evaluates two legal constructions of Alevism by the Turkish state and the European Court of Human Rights. While premised on differing assumptions about Alevism, both erase the indeterminacy and open-endedness surrounding Alevism as a lived tradition embedded in a broader field of social and cultural practices, while bolstering the role of the state in defining and overseeing Turkish religiosities.

What happened to biblical law when transferred into late antique Christianity? How can answering this question provide a paradigm that helps us understand the rise and development of late antique Christian legal traditions? In the first centuries of the Common Era, the Christian legal tradition began to evolve in Roman, Greek, rabbinic, and biblical contexts. Focusing on the biblical institution of levirate marriage, this article offers a paradigm that elucidates how Christians might have adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected their legal heritage; it may illuminate the overall development of Christian legal discourse. Following a short survey of the rabbinic adaptation of biblical levirate marriage and the Roman and Christian rulings regarding this practice, I analyze the Christian exegetical and theological discourse on levirate marriage, focusing on the acceptance or rejection of levirate marriage as a whole and adaptations to the biblical institution. This analysis demonstrates the disparity between the rabbinic discourse, the Christian and Roman rulings, and the theological and exegetical discourse. It shows how Christians remodeled their biblical heritage according to Greek and Roman legal concepts, namely the Roman adoption and the Greek epiklerate, and treated it as part of inheritance law and child-parent relationships, whereas the rabbis used different adaptations and treated it as part of matrimonial law and sexual relationships. This discussion therefore recontextualizes the legal discourse, positioning the Christian approach to levirate marriage as a complex case of legal transplant and adaptation of a legal heritage.

The nature and scope of the right to freedom of religion in international law is an increasingly contested and divisive question. While virtually all scholars from an array of traditions insist that the right itself is universal, they assert quite different foundations for and often widely divergent conceptions of that right.

Before examining more recent developments, a historical perspective is helpful in coming to understand the emergence and evolution of liberation theology in South Africa. This perspective establishes the contrasts between the passivity of the churches - their flaccid social and political witness - during the first six decades of this century and what followed after the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960.

By the late 19th century, the white Dutch Reformed Churches (DRC) were intimately associated with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and provided the initial institutional structure around which the volk gathered. As the 20th century unfolded, an Afrikaans language movement, the Afrikaner National Party, a secret society—the Broederbond (Brotherhood), separate volk schools, various welfare organizations and the Federation of Afrikans Cultural Organizations all helped to strengthen the white nationalist movement that was to capture the South African state in 1948. Afrikaner corporations helped to consolidate that power—SANLAM, VOLKSKAS and Federale Mynbou being pre-eminent. Afrikaner leadership was nurtured within the white trade union movement. Having gained control of the state, Afrikaners also came to dominate the civil service as well as the extensive parastatal sector of the apartheid economy. They established their ascendancy in the military and police. As Dr. Malan put it in 1938 when speaking at the centenary of the Battle of Blood River: “The Trekkers received their task from God's hand. They gave their answer. They made their sacrifices. There is still a white race. There is a new volk.” A decade later that nation had come to power.

In Buddhism, happiness is achieved when a person can perceive the true nature of reality, unmodified by the mental constructs we superimpose upon it. This authentic happiness comes from having an exceptionally healthy state of mind that underlies and suffuses all emotional states and that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come one's way. The mental states necessary for authentic happiness are not simply found or happened upon. Rather, happiness is achieved through mental training that purges the mind of afflictive emotions, such as hatred and compulsive desire, which literally poison the mind, and above all through the eradication of ignorance. This article discusses the Buddhist conception of happiness and its attainment. In particular, the article addresses the methods and practices that Buddhism employs to train the mind to achieve authentic happiness and the recent developments in contemplative neuroscience that complement and advance these methods.

In New York City on March 18, 2005 Dr. Amina Wadud shocked the Muslim world when she led a mixed-gender congregation in the Friday prayer. The Friday congregational prayer is at the center of Muslim religiosity. On Friday mid-day, Muslims come together as a community and turn collectively toward God. The form of the prayer affirms the community's identity; Muslims pray as brothers and sisters equal before God. They stand in straight lines, shoulder to shoulder. No one has a reserved spot. The rich stand next to the poor.

The lawyer in American law is an integral and essential part of the legal system. At the inception of this nation, the lawyer's role received official sanction by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to assistance of counsel “in all criminal proceedings.”

In Jewish law, by contrast, we find no such guarantee regarding the right to counsel. On the contrary, the lawyer was a concession, forced upon the Jewish legal system by certain exigencies. At no time was the lawyer viewed as essential to the adjudicative process. If anything, the lawyer was formerly seen as an obstacle to ascertaining truth. Nonetheless, the personage of the lawyer has today become an accepted feature of the Jewish legal world.

As in other systems, the lawyer in Jewish law plays primarily two roles, that of advocate and that of legal consultant. In this essay, I will highlight the various aspects of these roles, analyzing the function filled by the legal profession within Jewish law.

The religious revival that followed the collapse of the USSR provides an excellent opportunity to compare the dynamics of projects of religious freedom with those of religious repression. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, this article documents the contradictory effects that both repressive and liberal policies and laws have on religious expression. Thus, while Soviet anti-religious policies undeniably caused much suffering and hardship, religious repression also contributed to an intensification of religious experience among certain Muslim and evangelical groups. And while religious freedom laws expanded the scope for public religious organization and expression, they also produced new inequalities between religious groups, as the cases of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan demonstrate. Ultimately, the article shows that the effects of liberal and repressive laws are far from straightforward and need to be analyzed in relation to the social context in which they are applied.

The political rise of the religious right has brought to the fore the question of whether and to what extent religious values and beliefs should be taken into account when developing public policy. Policymakers have increasingly, or perhaps only more overtly, turned to religion for guidance on important public policy matters, such as abortion, stem cell research, and punishment, including the death penalty. Given the decidedly moral flavor of the debate over distributive justice, it is not surprising that many Americans and a growing number of policymakers have begun to look to religion for guidance on the question of how best to allocate tax burdens.

While tax scholars have long debated questions of equity and distributive justice, with one notable exception, they have largely ignored religious arguments. Given the large number of Americans who identify themselves as religious, to say nothing of most politicians, limiting the inquiry into tax equity to secular arguments runs the risk of relegating academic debate to the sidelines, as decision-makers look to the Bible and other religious texts for guidance and support.

Dr. Josef Mengele injected Sara Vigorito with unidentified substances as part of his infamous “twin experiments,” causing her to remain ill for seven years after being liberated from Auschwitz. Having survived that ordeal, she is now opposed to the scientific use of data from experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners. In her mind, using the data today would be “like building on top of Auschwitz.”

This Article will argue for the symbolic value of not using the Nazi data. Although symbolic value arguments have been recognized in the expansive literature on this question, they have not occupied center stage. Rather, argument concerning the use of the data has largely been conducted in two discourses, morality and pragmatism, which tend in our culture to have a more universal legitimacy. Putting the issue in these terms, however, misses the point. The question raised by the Nazi data cannot be answered satisfactorily by testing the strength of competing moral maxims or by weighing costs and benefits. We should ponder instead what the use or non-use of the data would say about us as a society. This in turn requires both that we evoke some idea about what we want to be (a substantive conception of good), and that we argue about what use or non-use would mean for that self-image (a theory of how symbols get their meanings).

Southern proslavery writers recognized that the powerful imagery employed by abolitionist writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe was among the abolitionists' most potent weapons in fighting slavery. Southern reviewers of Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin criticized Stowe most frequently for mischaracterizing the harshness of slavery. William Gilmore Simms, who published his novel Woodcraft as a proslavery answer to Stowe in 1854, thought her novel was a gross misrepresentation of the South:

There is a work of fiction, recently published by Mrs. Stowe, which is just now the rage with the abolitionists; the great error of which, throughout, consists in the accumulation of all the instances that can be found of cruelty or crime among the slaveholders. … She shows us a planter of Louisiana, as one of the most heartless, bloody, brutal, gross, loathsome and ignorant wretches under the sun. … [B]ut in doing so, she herself isolates him. She shows that he resides in a remote, and scarcely inaccessible swamp region, where his conduct comes under no human cognizance. How is society answerable for his offenses? How does he represent the condition and character of the slaveholder?

Happiness is a universal concept and experience that cuts across cultures and religions. Nonetheless, the particular manifestations and descriptions of happiness are culturally informed and contextualized. This essay explores the concepts of happiness and the pursuit of happiness in Islamic thought, arguing that the pursuit of happiness is envisaged differently in Islamic thought. Rather than the more transient forms of happiness celebrated in modern, secularized or hedonistic cultures, the pursuit of happiness in Islamic thought is concerned above all with the attainment of enduring happiness.

On Sunday, January 20, 2007, Tony Yengeni, former Chief Whip of South Africa's governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), celebrated his early release from a four-year prison sentence by slaughtering a bull at his father's house in the Cape Town township of Gugulethu. This time-honored African ritual was performed in order to appease the Yengeni family ancestors. Animal rights activists, however, decried the sacrifice as an act of unnecessary cruelty to the bull, and a public outcry ensued. Leading figures in government circles, including the Minister of Arts and Culture, Pallo Jordan, entered the fray, calling for a proper understanding of African cultural practices. Jody Kollapen, the Chair of the Human Rights Commission, said: “the slaughter of animals by cultures in South Africa was an issue that needed to be dealt with in context. Cultural liberty is an important right. …”

That the sacrifice was defended on the ground of African culture was to be expected. More surprising was the way in which everyone involved in the affair ignored what could have been regarded as an event of religious significance. Admittedly, it is far from easy to separate the concepts of religion and culture, and, in certain societies, notably those of pre-colonial Africa, this distinction was unknown. Today in South Africa, however, it is clearly necessary to make such a distinction for human rights litigation, partly because the Constitution specifies religion and culture as two separate rights and partly because it seems that those working under the influence of modern human rights seem to take religion more seriously than culture.