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Copyright of Canadian Political Science Review is the property of Canadian Political Science Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

»Säkularität durch eine ‚weiche Unterscheidung' in der islamischen Ökumene. Adab als Gegenpol zur Scharia «. This article highlights a 'soft' distinction in the regulation of human conduct which emerged through various epochs of Islamicate history: between adab as the marker of an ethical and literary tradition, on the one hand, and the normative claims covered by shari'a and drawing particularly on the exemplary sayings of Prophet Muhammad, the hadith corpus, on the other. Adab became a counterpoint to the hadith- shari'a discourse by relying on non-Prophetic and, in this sense, non-divine sources of knowledge. The first part of the study reconstructs the trajectory of adab in pre-colonial times while the second part explores crucial transformations occurring under the impact of European colonial modernity, whose discourse propagated a strongly autonomous notion of secular civility. The interventions of several Muslim reformers of the era contributed to make adab the hub of an autochthonous type of secularity. Here adab still works as a marker of a soft distinction -- only that it now becomes a 'double distinction': both between a mundane and a prophetic tradition within the Islamic ecumene, and between an emerging Muslim secularity and the European colonial one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy and secularism are the values of Western civilization promoted in modern centuries. Muslims differ in terms of absolute acceptance, absolute rejection or conditional acceptance. This article deals with them according to the texts of the Quran and the Sunnah, noting the current conditions of Muslims in the world and concluding that secularism does not correspond to Islam in any way, because it refuses to reference to what God has revealed. However, a Muslim must live in secular countries that allow him freedom of thought and religion, and provide beautiful models of Islamic ethics and call people to the right (hakk) in peaceful ways so that individuals in society adopt Islamic principles and agree to organize life according to the Quran and Sunnah. As for democracy, it is either restricted by reference to the Qur'an and Sunnah or it is divorced not. The first is an administrative form that is quite legitimate. And the second contains things contrary to Islamic principles such as non-reference in the enactment of laws to the Sharia and the assigment of deputies and leaders who do not care about the development of laws with the consent of the Sharia. However, Muslims can benefit from voting, for election, etc., especially if they need to defend their rights. But sometimes this is even necessary because of the circumstances in which they are. If they choose this path and see no real legislator except for Allah there is nothing wrong with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates howShari’ais experienced in the everyday life of 57 Muslims from Western Sydney. It focuses on their opinions about its application in Australia, and on how they negotiate their lives around the necessity or non-necessity of adhering toShari’aprinciples. The findings show that their observance of Islam tends to be negotiated in their everyday life within the framework of the Australian law, to which they show strong adherence. Respondents strongly reported the inaccurate picture ofShari’athat the media have painted. For this reason, the informants are reticent to have discussions in the public sphere about the implementation of officially recognisedShari’awithin an Australian legal system for fear that it would stoke the flames of Islamophobic sentiment. This is an impediment to the development of a post-secular Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While scholars of the Islamic revival have devoted attention to the increased prominence of Islamic law [the shari'a] in the once-secular public sphere, less attention has been paid to a countervailing trend. By mapping the evolution of Islamic law over the twentieth century, the author demonstrates that the shari'a is a product of decades of negotiations between Islamic institutions and more secular authorities including government ministers, doctors and social movements. This evolution suggests that secular authority and secular forms of knowledge have influenced but not displaced religious authority and religious forms of knowledge. The opposite is also true. This finding raises questions about the binary distinction between secular and sacred authority and suggests the coevolution of religion and secularism in modern Muslim societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes questions of sovereignty in shari'a scholarship today with parallel challenges in the nascent field of space law. Space law's focus on regulating political, economic, and social factors related to outer space--particularly its focus on the "peaceful uses of outer space" against its prevalent military applications--makes space law especially relevant to the "Muslim world," where Euroamerican dominance of this military high ground represents a specific differential of violence, power, and authority. Using a comparative approach to bring together these two perceived ends of law in their social, political, technological, and religious interactions with modern legal structures, this paper investigates the nature of law and its relationship to sovereignty and the state through differentials of power. Focusing on each field's debated notions of "law" as opposed to "governance," the veracity and multiplicity of shared or parallel legal contentions illustrate the challenge (for some, the crisis) of modernity as a legal (and broader) project of differentials of power across legal scopes. This shows that further comparative interrogations of space law and shari'a can continue to produce, and perhaps resolve, similar and pressing questions about the problem of sovereignty in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In independence-era Northern Nigeria, different segments of the modernizing elite contended over defining the place of Islam in society. This article argues that the case of Northern Nigeria disrupts scholarly periodizations of twentieth-century Islamic thought and activism that depict the 1950s and 1960s as a time of secularist dominance. The specificity of Muslim communities' experiences of colonialism and decolonization helped shape the role Islam played in different societies during this period. This article develops this thesis by examining the semiautonomous Northern Nigerian regional government's program of sending young, Arabophone Muslim scholars to Arab and British universities between 1954 and 1966. The overseas scholarships system was to be the culmination of British colonial efforts to produce 'modern' Muslim judges and teachers. However, Arabophones' experiences overseas, and their ambivalent relation-ship with the Northern government after their return highlight the unintended conse-quences of colonial policies and of scholarship winners' encounters with the broader Muslim world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the contemporary political conflicts in Muslim-majority countries are said to pit modern secularists against the “backward” Islamists. However an important stream of contemporary Muslim thought—critical-progressive Muslim thought—refuses to accept either a hegemony of Western secularism or a hegemony of Islamist fundamentalism. Critical-progressive Muslim scholar-activists are reinterpreting the normative teachings of the Muslim worldview and developing a distinctive third-way approach. There are several key political and policy ramifications of this stream of thought, including a robust commitment to religious freedom, but within Islamic terms, not terms dictated by non-Muslim Westerners preoccupied with their own security interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dîvân: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies / Disiplinlerarasi Calismalar Dergisi is the property of Bilim ve Sanat Vakfi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

What transpires when religious freedom and expression extend from the privacy of one's home and into the public sphere? Recent laws passed in France regarding the ḥijāb and face-veil vividly illustrate the tensions between a “secular” society and the right to religious freedom and expression. Moreover, Muslim women have been confronted with having to choose between conforming to French traditions of laïcité and their right to religious freedom and expression in the public sphere. As such, the broader question that this paper addresses is, to what extent are Muslims able to reconcile elements of Shari'a law that are incompatible with the laws of the state in which they reside? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tariq Ramadan, one of the most famous European Muslim thinkers, seeks to re-interpret Qur'an and Sunna and to create a European Islam, which can be harmonised with the principles of secular states. He is not an undisputed figure; to some he is an outstanding reformer whereas to others he is devious in favour of Islamist currents. His most innovative contribution is his concept of dār ashshahāda which leaves behind the confrontational notion of dār al-islām and dār al-harb. Thus, he judges European societies as legitimate places of living for Muslims. He emphasises the peaceful aspects of jihād, although he does not deny that jihād can become militant in cases of defence. Ramadan appeals to European Muslims for agitating for a firm stand in their societies. I argue in this article that this cannot be simply judged as “Islamist engagement,” but emphasis on religious morality, which should play a major role in society, is also placed by representatives of other religions—and the right to lead public debates or to demonstrate one's faith is an inherent trait of secularism as long as all religions are treated equally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I am concerned with understanding the recent efforts to reform the laws governing marriage and inheritance, the code de la famille or the Family Code in Mali. Since the advent of multiparty elections in the 1990s, prominent members of the Malian government and civil servants, Malian women's rights activists, secular NGOs, and international and bilateral donors have made efforts to promote various social reforms, including the advancement of women's rights and the promotion of gender equality, particularly through changes in the Family Code. While some observers have attributed the lack of reform to the increased influence of “Islamists” and/or to religiously conservative Muslims, I draw on historical research and ethnography to propose an alternative reading of the lack of institutional law reform. As I argue, the gap between Malian civil law relating to the family and the lived experiences and social practices of many Malians, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, has become even more apparent in this era of political liberalization and promotion of global human rights discourses. This has helped to make such proposed social reforms as the promotion of women's rights and family law reform more contentious and the ultimate outcome even more uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]