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This book offers the first sustained jurisprudential inquiry into Islamic natural law theory. It introduces readers to competing theories of Islamic natural law theory based on close readings of Islamic legal sources from as early as the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. In popular debates about Islamic law, modern Muslims perpetuate an image of Islamic law as legislated by God, to whom the devout are bound to obey. Reason alone cannot obligate obedience; at most it can confirm or corroborate what is established by source texts endowed with divine authority. This book shows, however, that premodern Sunni Muslim jurists were not so resolute. They asked whether and how reason alone can be the basis for asserting the good and the bad, and thereby obligations and prohibitions of the Shari'a. They theorized about the authority of reason amidst competing theologies of God. For these jurists, nature became the link between the divine will and human reason. Nature is the product of God's creative power. Nature is created by God and reflects his goodness; consequently nature is fused with both fact and value. As a divinely created good, nature can be investigated to reach both empirical and normative conclusions about the good to be pursued. By recasting the Islamic legal tradition in terms of legal philosophy, the book sheds substantial light on an uncharted tradition of natural law theory and offers critical insights into contemporary global debates about Islamic law and reform.

There is increasing attention among policy makers and the public to the role of shari’a in everyday life for Western Muslims, raising many negative associations and public fear. In fact, the most common way in which North American Muslims relate to shari’a is via observance of Islamic marriage and divorce rituals. Recourse to traditional Islamic marriage—or nikah—and, to a lesser extent, religious divorce, is common among Muslims regardless of their levels of traditional observance. Based on hundreds of personal interviews, this book describes Muslim marriage and divorce processes in the West, and what they mean to North American Muslims. The picture that emerges is of an idiosyncratic and inconsistent private ordering system, dominated by imams and other community leaders, and reflecting a range of attitudes towards contemporary norms, especially changes in gender roles. While there are many criticisms—in particular from women—of pervasive assumptions regarding traditional gender roles, there are also many who attest to the significance of Islamic marriage and divorce for them as believing Muslims and as members of their cultural community. A Western shari’a challenges the intersection between state sanction and private religious and cultural practice, particularly the balance between the state’s commitment to human rights and equality and the protection of religious freedom.

Revival from Below tells the story of the Deoband movement, one of the most important Islamic revivalist movements of the modern era. Founded in 1866 in colonial northern India, the movement has expanded globally through the establishment of seminaries (madrasas) that are similar to the original Deobandi seminary, the Dar al-`Ulum in Deoband, India. Today the Deoband movement is best known for the fact that the Taliban emerged from Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan. Because of this connection, comparatively little scholarly work has been done on other, more central, aspects of the movement. This book focuses on the movement’s efforts to regulate and shape Muslim public life, especially through its scholars’ critiques of popular devotional practices (especially celebrations of the prophet Muhammad’s birthday and Sufi saints’ death anniversaries), despite the fact that Deobandi scholars themselves identify as Sufis. The book examines how Deobandi scholars used the publication of short texts to carry out this reformist mission. It then traces how these critiques travel through Indian Muslim networks to South Africa, where they intersect with Muslim publics and politics that are markedly different from the Indian context. Accordingly, this book is the first extensive study of Deobandis beyond South Asia and of their efforts to maintain the centrality of traditionally educated Islamic scholars (the `ulama) in Muslim public life.

This book captures the autobiographical reflections of twenty-eight Christians who were amongst those who, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and initiatives of the World Council of Churches, committed their lives to the study of Islam and to practical Christian-Muslim relations in new and irenic ways. They record what drew them into the study of Islam, how their careers developed, what sustained them in this work and salient milestones along the way. These men and women come from a dozen nationalities and across the spectrum of the Western Church. Their accounts take us to twenty-five countries and into all the branches of Islamic studies: Qur'an, Hadith, Shari'a, Sufism, philology, theology and philosophy. They range in age from late-forties to late-nineties and so have a wealth of experience to share. They give fascinating insights into personal encounters with Islam and Muslims, speak of the ways in which their Christian traditions of spiritual training formed and nourished them, and deal with some of the misunderstandings and opposition that they have faced along the way. In an analytical conclusion, the editors draw out themes and pointers towards future developments. Such a constellation has not existed before and will not be seen again for at least half a century. Theirs is a unique generation and this is their considered contribution to the state of Christian-Muslim engagement today.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Egyptian women gained the unique right to divorce their husbands unilaterally through a procedure called khul'. This has been a controversial application; notwithstanding attempts to present the law as being grounded in Islamic law, opponents claim that khul' is a privileged women's law, and a western conspiracy aimed at destroying Egyptian family life and, by extension, Egyptian society. In Khul' Divorce in Egypt, Nadia Sonneveld explores the nature of the public debates—including the portrayal of khul' in films and cartoons—while an examination of the application of khul' in the courts and everyday life relates and compares this debate to the actual implementation of the procedure. She makes it clear that the points of controversy bear little resemblance to the lives of the lower-middle-class women who apply for khul'; they merely reflect profound changes in the institutions of marriage and family.

Muslims have lived in Europe for hundreds of years. Only in 1878, however, did many of them become formal citizens of European states. Muslims and the Making of Europe shows how this massive shift in citizenship rights transformed both Muslims’ daily lives and European laws and societies. Starting with the Treaty of Berlin and ending with the eradication of the Shari’a legal system in communist Yugoslavia, this book centers Muslim voices and perspectives in an analysis of the twists and turns of nineteenth- and twentieth- century European history, from early nation-building projects to the shattering of the European imperial order after World War I, through the interwar political experiments of liberal democracy and authoritarianism, and into the Second World War, when Muslims, like other Europeans, were caught between occupation and civil conflict, and the ideological programs of fascism and communism. Its focus moves from Ottoman Europe in the late nineteenth century to Yugoslavia, a multi-confessional, multi-lingual state founded after World War I. Throughout these decades, Muslims negotiated with state authorities over the boundaries of Islamic law, the nature of religious freedom, and the meaning of minority rights. As they did so, Muslims helped to shape emergent political, social, and legal projects in Europe.

How to accommodate diverse religious practices and laws within a secular framework is one of the most pressing and controversial problems facing contemporary European public order. This book argues that traditional models of secularism, focusing on the relationship of state and church, are out-dated and that only by embracing a new picture of what secularism means can Europe move forward in the public reconciliation of its religious diversity. The book develops a new model of secularism suitable for Europe as a whole. The new model of secularism is concerned with the way in which modern secular states deal with the presence of diversity in the society. This new conception of secularism is more suited to the European Union whose overall aim is to promote a stable, peaceful and unified economic and political space starting from a wide range of different national experiences and perspectives. The new conception of secularism is also more suited for the Council of Europe at large, and in particular the European Court of Human Rights which faces growing demands for the recognition of freedom of religion in European states. The new model does not defend secularism as an ideological position, but aims to present secularism as our common constitutional tradition as well as the basis for our common constitutional future.

The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations' secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? This book tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, it delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts—the last courts in Egypt to use Shari'a law—the book shows that secularism is an historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, it highlights secularism's dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates.