Islam, Law and Identity
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Islam, Law and Identity The essays brought together in Islam, Law and Identity are the product of a series of interdisciplinary workshops that brought together scholars from a plethora of countries. Funded by the British Academy the workshops convened over a period of two years in London, Cairo and Izmir. PROOFSThe workshops and the ensuing papers focus on recent debates about the nature of sacred and secular law and most engage case studies from specific countries including Egypt, Israel, Kazakhstan, Mauritania, Pakistan and the UK. Islam, Law and Identity also addresses broader and over-arching concerns about relationships between religion, human rights, law and modernity. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches, the collection presents law as central to the complex ways in which different Muslim communities and institutions create and re-create their identities around inherently ambiguous symbols of faith. From their different perspectives, the essays argue that there is no essential conflict between secular law and Shari’a, but various different articulations of the sacred and the secular. Islam, Law and Identity explores a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the tensions that animate such terms as Shari’a law, modernity and secularization. Marinos Diamantides is Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London where he teaches constitutional law and theory. He has published extensively on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Adam Gearey is a Reader in Law at Birkbeck College. His publications include Critical Jurisprudence, authored with Costas Douzinas. He is presently working on a text tentatively entitled Welfare as Justice. UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 1 5/16/11 3:25:26 PM PROOFS UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 2 5/16/11 3:25:26 PM Islam, Law and Identity Edited by PROOFS Marinos Diamantides and Adam Gearey UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 3 5/16/11 3:25:26 PM First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Marinos Diamantides and Adam Gearey The right of Marinos Diamantides and Adam Gearey to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. PROOFS Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested ISBN 13: 978-0-415-56681-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-80948-8 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond by Graphigraft Limited, Hong Kong UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 4 5/16/11 3:25:26 PM Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on contributors PROOFSviii Introduction: politics, theology sovereignty 1 Marinos Diamantides and Adam Gearey 1 Transcendence and interpretation: introductory notes on the theology of the rule of law 23 Lior Barshack 2 Shari’a, faith and critical legal theory 49 Marinos Diamantides 3 One law against another? Reading the veil cases: the foundational reference, Shari’a and human rights 68 Adam Gearey 4 The gift of ambiguity: strategising beyond the either/or of secularism and religion in Islamic divorce law 89 Hassan El Menyawi 5 What is Islamic law? A praxiological answer and an Egyptian case study 113 Baudouin Dupret 6 State of equalities: law, marriage and citizenship in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania 136 Satyel Larson UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 5 5/16/11 3:25:27 PM vi Contents 7 Entrepreneurs and morals 167 Gül Berna Özcan 8 Religion, politics and the dilemma of national identity in Pakistan 186 Tasneem Kausar 9 Theorizing Islam without the state: Islamic discourses on the minority status of Muslims in the West 209 Alexandre Caeiro 10 Terror in the faculty lounge: addressing the politics of fear and the politics of difference in government security policies 236 K.E. Brown PROOFS Index 263 UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 6 5/16/11 3:25:27 PM Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank the British Academy for enabling this project and Valerie Kelley for her editorial work and advice. We are also grateful to the American University in Cairo and the Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir for their hospitality; and Routledge GlassHouse forPROOFS their support and understanding. UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 7 5/16/11 3:25:27 PM Notes on contributors Lior Barshack is Professor of Law and Social Theory at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel. After graduating from Oxford University Lior Barshack pursued post-doctoral studies in Paris and New York and was a member of Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. His researchPROOFS interests include political theology, political theory, theories of kinship, and relations between politics and the arts. Dr Katherine E. Brown is a lecturer at King’s College London. Her work draws on three intellectual heritages: feminism, human rights, and critical war/security studies. She currently researches the roles of Muslim women in security politics, with a focus on the UK. Her work has been generously funded by the ESRC, British Academy, and King’s College London, and she has published and presented her findings widely. Alexandre Caeiro is a Research Fellow at the Erlangen Centre for Islam and Law in Europe (EZIRE) at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen- Nuernberg, Germany. He works on integration discourses and the dynam- ics of religious authority amongst Muslim minorities in the West. Marinos Diamantides is Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London where he teaches constitutional law and theory. He has published extensively on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas [his latest publication is Law, Levinas, Politics (2009 Routledge-Cavendish, second edition)]. He is interested in the relationship of modern political philosophy and legalism with monotheist dogmas. In this and other publications he attempts a comparative study of legalism across monotheist cultures. Baudouin Dupret is educated in Law, Islamic Sciences and Political Sciences. He is Directeur de Recherche at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He was appointed in 2010 as Director of the Centre Jacques-Berque in Rabat, Morocco. He is also guest lecturer in Islamic law and socio-legal sciences at the University of Louvain and the Institute for advanced studies in the social sciences (EHESS), Paris. He has published extensively in the field of the sociology and anthropology UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 8 5/16/11 3:25:27 PM Notes on contributors ix of law, legislation and media, especially in the Middle East. His current work involves a praxiological approach to the production of truth in Arab contexts, including courts and parliaments, scientific expertise, the media, and religious education. He also (co-)edited numerous volumes, the last one being Narratives of Truth in Islamic Law (Saqi books, 2008), and authored several single-authored books, for example Practices of Truth (Benjamins, forthcoming) and Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology of Law, Moral and Justice (Ashgate, forthcoming). Professor Tasneem Kausar is a graduate of Pakistan College of Law, Lahore and Yale Law School, USA. Presently, she is working as Principal and Associate Professor of Law, at Pakistan College of Law, Lahore. Her areas of interest include Constitutional Law and Politics, Islamic Law, and Criminal Law. Professor Kausar has attended several national and international con- ferences and seminars in the USA, Canada, France, UK, Nepal, Turkey, India and Australia. Her articles and essays have been publishedPROOFS in various prestigious national and international journals. Satyel Larson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Presently, she is writing a dissertation on the transformations in legal, medical and religious knowledge of the female body and reproductive technologies in modern Morocco. Hassan El Menyawi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at New York University. In his previous work in human rights law, he was the Distinguished Kemp Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College and the International Law and Human Rights Assistant Professor at the United Nations University for Peace. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has published and lectured worldwide in the areas of human rights, LGBT rights, gender and sexuality, and the Middle East. Dr Gül Berna Özcan is Reader in International Business and Entrepreneur- ship at Royal Holloway, University of London. Dr Özcan has been an expert evaluator for the European Commission since 2003 and a research director of the Gurukul Global Leadership Programme at the London School of Economics. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on local economic development, small and medium-sized enter- prises, entrepreneurship and economic transition in Turkey and Central Asia. UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 9 5/16/11 3:25:27 PM PROOFS UNCORRECTED 9780415566810_A01.indd 10 5/16/11 3:25:27 PM Introduction Politics, theology sovereignty Marinos Diamantides and Adam Gearey I. Secularism, religious faith and state law This collection invites the reader to turn from the current obsession with the role of Islam in the modern world, and rethink the relationshipPROOFS between law, faith and power; one of the most pressing questions that we presently face.