Religion Law Commons^™

Muslim Prisoner Litigation: An Unsung American Tradition (Introduction), Spearit

Book Chapters

For most Americans, “prison jihad” may sound frightening and conjure images of religious militants, bearded, turbaned, and under the spell of foreign radical networks…. While this may be the immediate impression, there is nothing like that happening in American prisons. However, there has been a different type of jihad taking place, one that is real and identifiable. This is not the sensational jihad of headline media; rather, this jihad is uneventful and quiet by comparison and has persisted since the 1960s with hardly any public notice.

Despite little attention and recognition, Muslims in prison occupy a unique spot in the …

Understanding An American Paradox: An Overview Of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Spearit

Articles

In The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Sahar Aziz unveils a mechanism that perpetuates the persecution of religion. While the book’s title suggests a problem that engulfs Muslims, it is not a new problem, but instead a recurring theme in American history. Aziz constructs a model that demonstrates how racialization of a religious group imposes racial characteristics on that group, imbuing it with racial stereotypes that effectively treat the group as a racial rather than religious group deserving of religious liberty.

In identifying a racialization process that effectively veils religious discrimination, Aziz’s book points to several important …

Natural Law And Universal Human Rights, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Abdullahi An-Na'im has set his life's quest on attempting to find a way that Muslim society can be attuned to the moral commands of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a Western creation. At present, the Shari'a and the Declaration are in obvious tension, if not conflict, in areas such as freedom of religion and the rights of women. An-Na'im finds that the Shari 'a is a creation of man derived in history from an interpretation of Islamic sources. Muslims today can legitimately develop their own interpretation relying on the root sources of Islam, but only so long as those …

9/11 Impacts On Muslims In Prison, Spearit

Articles

This essay is part of a volume that reflects on the 20-year anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The work examines the impacts this event had on the management of Muslims in prison. Soon after the attacks, the culture war against Muslims in the United States began to seep into prisons, where Muslims faced heightened levels of Islamophobia, which cut across several areas of existence: the ability to access religious literature, religious leaders, and paraphernalia, in addition to the federal creation of Communication Management Units. There was also heightened hysteria about the idea of Muslim radicalization in prison, …

State Regulation Of Religion: The Effect Of Religious Freedom On Muslims' Religiosity, Hannah M. Ridge

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

Substantial scholarship argues that regulation of religion suppresses religiosity in a community by reducing individuals’ satisfaction with their religious experience. To date this research has assumed that regulations are enforced on and affect religious communities uniformly. It has also focused heavily on Western Christian populations and aggregated national data. We suggest that state regulation of religious communities and behaviours impacts citizens differently based on their affiliation. Using individual-level assessments of freedom and religiosity from Muslim-majority countries, we show that, at the individual level, restricting freedom suppresses religious belief and behaviour. Restrictions on religious minorities, however, can increase religiosity. As such, …

From The Ulama To The Legislature: Hermeneutics & Morocco’S Family Code, Rachel Olick-Gibson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study examines the role that Islamic law has played thus far in reforming the Moroccan Family Code, also known as the Moudawana. When King Mohammed VI reformed this law in 2004, Morocco received immediate international praise for its liberal strides towards gender equality. Through this study I investigated the hermeneutical tools and methods of ijtihad employed both by the drafters of the Moudawana and by activists leading up to the 2004 reforms. I then investigate impediments to the implementation of this Code in providing substantive legal rights to Moroccan women and the role that interpretation of Islamic law plays …

Nigeria's Membership In The Organization Of Islamic Cooperation: Origin, Nature, And Impact, Eddy Aitah

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Nigeria’s membership into the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), covertly instituted by General Ibrahim Babangida who rose to power as Nigeria’s military head of state in 1985, a strategic move that resulted in socioeconomic benefits which improved the standard of living of the people of Nigeria. Regionally divided, Muslim influence on the north, and Christian to the south. The commingling with other traditional Nigerian religious cultures, sociopolitical strategies, and legislative protocol are contested by these opposing factions on a continuum. Using archival research methods, both textual and multimedia, this work posits that despite the religious controversies and …

Lost & Found: New Harvest, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

Set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the 12th century, a great crossroads of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens …

Islam In The Mind Of American State Courts: 1960 To 2001, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

This project reviews how American state courts portrayed Islam and Muslims from 1960 until September 11, 2001. The purpose of this project is not to construct some overarching theoretical framework to explain American social and legal views of Islam and Muslims, though I will necessarily interpret what the cases say to some extent. Given the lengthy time period involved, the number of cases in which Muslims or Islam are referenced, and the fact that these cases come from many states, it seemed prudent to defer to others who have constructed critiques of the way American law as a whole has …

Reframing Radical Religion, Vanita Saleema Snow

Journal Articles

Like a thief in the night,1 politicians have stolen religion for their deceptive vices, using the term “radicalization” or “terrorism” to meet their needs.2 See Sahar F. Aziz, Caught in a Preventive Dragnet: Selective Counterterrorism in a Post-9/11 America, 47 GONZ. L. REV. 429, 481 (2012) (discussing how a police report equates “Muslim religiosity with radicalization toward terrorism”); David A. Bosworth, American Crusade: The Religious Roots of the War on Terror, 7 BARRY L. REV. 65, 65 (2006) (noting that American news and popular culture often portray religious people as “narrow-minded bigots out to destroy everything good and decent”); Ned …

Post Secularism And The Woman Question, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I will discuss the “woman question in post secularism” by offering my critique of Saba Mahmood’s book “Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject”. But before I do so, let me just state that I am a legal academic and I am not a reader of the field of anthropology. I am unfamiliar with the theoretic jargon of the discipline- even less so of the jargon of the subfield, anthropology of religion from which Politics of Piety hails. Each discipline is autonomous more so fields of study within each discipline. Those fields usually coalesce around a celebrity …

Consociationalism Vs. Incentivism In Divided Societies: A Question Of Threshold Design Or Of Sequencing?, Clark B. Lombardi, Pasarlay Shamshad

Articles

Scholarship on constitutional design for post-conflict or divided societies focuses a great deal of attention on two issues: (1) the processes and timing by which constitutional rules should be established and (2) whether constitutions should reflect a consociationalist or incentivist approach to governance. Scholars are increasingly willing to entertain the possibility that constitutions drafted during period of transition from civil war or authoritarianism need not, and often should not, answer immediately all questions that constitutions tend to answer; however, they tend to assume that the question of whether constitutions should be consociationalist or incentivist is one that should not be …

Religious Difference In A Secular Age: The Minority Report By Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Minority Report is a text that tries to respond to the problem of essentializing Islam (the culturalism problem) by performing a flip so that all the bad attributes typically associated with “Islam” are now attributed to secularism instead. It is secularism that discriminates, that is sectarian, that encourages violence, that is repressive, sexist, etc. This Mahmood does by on the one hand hyper-politicizing secularism (depleting it of its universalist drive), and on the other under-politicizing it by ignoring its internal indeterminacy, complexity, open structure and varied distributive effects. The result is an account that moves between crude historicism-secularism is …

Salafism, Wahhabism, And The Definition Of Sunni Islam, Rob J. Williams

Honors Program: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

My capstone deals with the historical definition of Sunni Islam, and how it has changed in approximately the past 200 years. Around 1800, Sunni Islam was pretty clearly defined by an adherence to one of four maddhabs, or schools of law: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools and are all based in nearly a millennium of legal scholarship. Since 1800, however, numerous reform movements have sprung up which disavow previous scholarship and interpret Islamic law their own way. However, certain reformist groups, such as Traditionalist Salafis and Wahhabis, claim that their version of Islam is the only “pure” …

The Role Of Personal Laws In Creating A “Second Sex”, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Indira Jaising

All Faculty Scholarship

The cultural construction of gender determines the role of women and girls within the family in many societies. Gendered notions of power in the family are often shrouded in religion and custom and find their deepest expression in Personal Laws. This essay examines the international law framework as it relates to personal laws and the commonality of narratives of litigators and plaintiffs in the cases from the three different personal law systems in India.

In God We Trust, Andrew C. Nosti

SURGE

Almost everywhere I turn I can hear someone saying, “America is a Christian nation!” likely yelled or grumbled with impressive, and sometimes concerning, aggression. I can’t go through a week without this phrase popping up, usually closely accompanied by the notion that America’s founding has roots in Christian principles. [excerpt]

Islamic Law And Constitution-Making: The Authoritarian Temptation And The Arab Spring, Mohammad Fadel

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

The political dynamics that have characterized post-Mubarak Egypt have often been understood to be a battle between "religious" forces, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, and "secularist" forces, represented by a diverse group of civil society actors. Opposition of this latter group to the "religious" politics of the Muslim Brotherhood is therefore understood to be the primary cause of the events that led to the July 3, 2013 military coup that overthrew Egypt's only freely elected President, Mohammed Morsi. Without denying the salience of a religious-secularist divide in Egypt, this narrative of post-Mubarak politics fails to appreciate the …

Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop In The Age Of Mass Incarceration, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and …

The Impossible, Highly Desired Islamic Bank, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

The purpose of this Article is to explore, and explain the stubborn persistence of, a central paradox that is endemic to the retail Islamic bank as it operates in the United States. The paradox is that retail Islamic banking in the United States is impossible, and yet it remains highly desired. It is impossible because the principles that are supposed to underlie the practice of Islamic finance deal with the trading of assets and the equitable sharing of risks, profits and losses among bank, depositor and portfolio investment. It is true that much of this can be, and is, circumvented …

Veiled Women In The American Courtroom: Is The Niqab A Barrier To Justice?, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

U.S. courts and policy-makers have recently authorized laws and practices that interfere with the wearing of religious modesty attire that conceals the hair or face in contexts such as courtroom testimony or driver’s license issuance. For example, in response to a court’s dismissal of the case of a woman who refused to remove her niqab in the courtroom, the Michigan Supreme Court decided that judges can exercise “reasonable control” over the appearance of courtroom parties. But what degree of control over religious attire is reasonable? The Constitution will not allow a blanket niqab removal policy based on any of the …

Shari'ah Law As National Security Threat?, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the recently proposed anti-shari’ah laws of Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arizona. It begins by examining the laws and their justifications and analyzes the 10th Circuit decision in Awad v. Ziriax upholding the injunction against Oklahoma’s Save Our State amendment. It then carefully analyzes the cases that have been cited as examples of shari’ah-creep and reveals that they are actually routine examples of comity and conflicts of law rules applied properly by a properly functioning judiciary. If these laws are not national security measures, what is their true purpose? The Article posits that the new laws are the latest …

The Politics Of Hate, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This is a special issue dedicated to the topic of hate and political discourse. Collectively, the peer-reviewed articles in this volume are concerned with the political aspects of hatred, i.e., psychology, motivations, organization, tactics, and ends. The articles approach the problem from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among the subjects analyzed: group hatred as a heritable trait; hate as an irrational system of thought; Italian fascism's construction of the Communist other; the rise of the English Defence League and its anti-Islam activities; the persistent myth of blood libel; judicial handling …

The Arabs In The (Inter)National, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This essay is a commentary on an article submitted by Professor Lama Abu-Odeh as part of a special symposium edition contained in Volume 10 of the Santa Clara Journal of International Law. In her piece, Professor Abu-Odeh builds on her earlier work respecting Islamic law but adds a new target to her sites, that of the study of national security. That is, we already knew Professor Abu-Odeh’s view of the typical Islamic law scholar. He is one who is focused either on the resurrection of the shari’a in some sort of reconstructed form or involved in a thoroughly misguided search …

Religion As Rehabilitation? Reflections On Islam In The Correctional Setting, Spearit

Articles

This essay is the keynote lecture from the Muslims in the United States and Beyond symposium at Whittier Law School. The work reflects on the state of research into Islam in prison, including the religion's historic role in supporting inmate rehabilitation and providing a means for coping with life as a prisoner and on the outside.

Veiled Women In The American Courtroom: Is The Niqab A Barrier To Justice?, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

U.S. courts and policy-makers have recently authorized laws and practices that interfere with the wearing of religious modesty attire that conceals the hair or face in contexts such as courtroom testimony or driver’s license issuance. For example, in response to a court’s dismissal of the case of a woman who refused to remove her niqab in the courtroom, the Michigan Supreme Court decided that judges can exercise “reasonable control” over the appearance of courtroom parties. But what degree of control over religious attire is reasonable? The Constitution will not allow a blanket niqab removal policy based on any of the …

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 …

Mulieris Dignitatem And The Exclusivity Of Marriage Under Law, Howard Bromberg

Articles

Jesus Christ established monogamy, the marriage of one man to one woman, as the canonical norm of his church and the juridical norm for all nations. This was a unique event in the history of the cultures and religions of the world. The Catholic Church has always defended its canonical norm of monogamy, often with great opposition. Through its influence, monogamy has been established as law in the Western world and in almost all cultures influenced by Western law and norms. The emerging jurisprudence of the United States, however, rejects any religious derivation as the basis of our laws. With …

Turkey: At The Crossroads Of Secular West And Traditional East, Padideh Ala'i

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

On January 9, 2008 Washington College of Law at American University sponsored a conference entitled: Turkey: At the Crossroads of Secular West and Traditional East. This conference was percipitated by the recent election of the AKP party in Turkey and my trip to Turkey in summer 2007. In this short introduction to the American University International law Review symposium issue, I summarize the major issues raised in that one day conference specifically by Dean Haluk Kabaalioglu of Yeditepe University Facutly of Law, expert on EU law and Turkish-EU relations,and Professor Feroz Ahmad, the learned historian of modern Turkey. The aim …

(Mis)Appropriated Liberty: Identity, Gender Justice And Muslim Personal Law Reform In India, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This article argues that in order to emancipate Indian-Muslim women from an outdated family legal code, their position at the intersection of gender and a minority religion must be taken seriously. Proposals for reform that have been suggested by Western liberal, secular feminists that ignore the importance of women's religious affiliation fail to do this. Moreover, by making assumptions about the strength of secularism in India, the willingness of the state to enact legal reforms driven by gender concerns, and by failing to acknowledge the limits of formal rights alone in changing norms, these scholars do not account for the …