Law Commons^™

Elusive Equality: The Armenian Genocide And The Failure Of Ottoman Legal Reform, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to deliver some remarks this morning. By way of background, I am not a historian or genocide scholar, but a law professor with an interest in comparative law and religion. Comparative law and religion is a relatively new field. It explores how different legal regimes reflect, and influence, the relationships that religious communities have with the state and with each other. My recent work compares Islamic and Christian conceptions of law, a subject that has engaged Muslims and Christians since their first encounters in the seventh century.

When I approach …

Fiqh And Canons: Reflections On Islamic And Christian Jurisprudence, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

Although American scholarship has begun to address both Christian and Islamic jurisprudence in a serious way, virtually none of the literature attempts to compare the place of law in these two world religions. This Essay begins to compare Islamic and Christian conceptions of law and suggests some implications for contemporary debates about religious dispute settlement. Islam and Christianity are subtle and complex religions. Each has competing strands; each has evolved over millennia and expressed itself differently over time. Moreover, although systematic treatments of Islamic law are beginning to appear in English, much remains available only in languages, like Arabic, that …