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In March 2008, Britain's Christian Research organization disseminated a study that made the following projection: By 2020, the number of Catholics attending Sunday mass will have been surpassed by the number of Muslims worshiping in mosques in Britain. This study came out in the middle of growing tensions about the place of Muslims in British society and fanned some alarmist flames about the changing face of Britain. This backlash was not far off the heels of a lecture given at the Royal Courts of Justice, in February 2008, by Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which also ruffled British feathers. He suggested that British Muslims be allowed to live freely under the shari'a law, signaling that there is something more than just the official British legal system alone. This speech not only highlights the significance of legal pluralism; it also raises the question of what it means to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice. This chapter discusses how some Muslim intellectuals have dealt with the question of the religious neutrality of the liberal state. It examines the question raised by official recognition of a shari'a council in Britain: To what extent should religious identity and practice be accommodated under a liberal legal framework? The chapter explores the related questions of power and representation at this significant site, where the diaspora intersects with the national spaces that it continually negotiates.

McMurray’s chapter argues that law is a profoundly sonic medium, acting in, through, against, and modeled on sound—and more particularly, voice. Legal and cultural reforms in Islamicate societies in the Black Sea region during and around the time of the Crimean War illustrate these dynamics especially well. The first part of the chapter compares the legal reforms of the Caucasian Imamate (in North Daghestan and Chechnya) and the Ottoman Empire, showing how sound played a central role in negotiating new meanings of Islamic shari‘a law within those societies. Law thus becomes a critical archive for histories of sound, vocality, and listening. The latter part then reflects on the ontologies of law as a medium, considering both its sonic qualities—a recurring motif in both Anglo-American and Islamic jurisprudence—and its relation to the telegraph in particular, as a communications technology that simultaneously facilitated and challenged extant legal regimes.

Provides an examination of the written sources in the national media, including newspapers and magazines. In addition to an analysis of the debate on khul', it presents an examination of reforms related to personal status adopted in the wake of the khul' law, in the period between 2000 and 2002.

The current and future conflict with jihadi groups in the global war on terrorism puts great pressure on much of the inherited just war tradition. The actors are not uniformed soldiers. They do not act in the name of and on behalf of a state. Their way of construing the aims of their conflict do not conform to the assumptions of the Westphalian international system at all—most dramatically in their quest for a global caliphate governed by shari‘a law. This chapter assesses the arguments presented for a radical rejection of existing just war standards in light of the threat posed by the global jihadi movement, as well as offers a constructive proposal for how and why existing just war standards may need augmentation or modification if the West is to respond to this threat in a way that is both effective and consonant with its fundamental values.

This chapter returns us to the question of how colonial governments made policy choices about the treatment of subject populations, particularly in circumstances where imperial security was at stake. The role of what might be termed “lessons from the past” in determining these choices is central to the answer. So, too, is the part played by intelligence providers, whose past experiences provided frames of reference for policy makers, shaping the ways in which these lessons were understood by politicians and senior colonial officials. The chapter thus connects past precedents and the dilemmas of colonial security in the interwar period. Colonial authorities recognized the organizational power of Islam and the centrality of Shari'a law to Muslims' lives. However, colonialism imposed requirements for political loyalty, as well as legal systems based on the ownership and sale of private property, that were at variance with customary practices and Islam's codes of behavior.

In the empire of Muhammad Ali in the Near East, Upper Egypt was the “first colony.” Before invading other territories, the Pasha first fought fierce wars to incorporate the south into a unified Egyptian state. As in other world cases of “internal colonialism,” the pasha’s empire depended on the economic exploitation of the internal colony to support further external expansion. This process involved the implantation of imperial settlers and the creation of vast plantations in the south of Egypt. As his extended empire began to collapse, the pasha’s hegemony over the south also waned. Qina province constantly simmered with both separatist revolts and the resistance of daily life, which was championed by peasants, women, laborers, slaves, and ever-ruthless bandits.

This chapter examines the power struggle that emerged between British customary law and Shari'a law over matters pertaining to family. The conflict has its roots in the two different legal systems that governed Iraq during the British occupation—the rural population was subject to customary law through the TCCDR, while the urban population was subject to law under the civil and criminal courts that followed Shari'a law which were charged with handling matters of personal status among Iraqi Muslims. Islam in British rhetoric however was often synonymous with backwardness, and Islamic law, especially as regards women, was inconsistent with Western concepts. The chapter discusses how this power struggle further constructed women as “subordinate” and dependent, which left them unprotected from harsh treatment by kin and husbands and from uncompromising rulings by religious clerics.

This chapter examines the secular and the religious in Turkey as a self-reaffirming “binary pair.” It describes Turkish laicism as a process, not of separation, but of the containment and subordination of religion by the state through law and the efforts of the Directorate for Religious Affairs. The DRA does not claim authority only as a state agency: it also projects its own understanding of shari'a law, Greek Orthodox devotional practices, and other religious matters.

This chapter examines the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the People’s Court and its exceptional powers. The RCC saw the tribunal as a mean to promote much broader objectives than the prosecution of the accused in the assassination attempt on Prime Minister ‛Abd al-Nasir. The court wanted to strike a fatal blow against the MB. In fact, the transcripts show that the court focused very little on the details of the assassination attempt. The questioning of the accused and the witnesses addressed broader issues, including the aims of the MB and their national and civic commitments. The judges and the prosecution presented the MB as cynically exploiting innocent civilians to promote a radical agenda that threatened to plunge Egypt into a civil war (fitna). Yet, the questioning of the accused and the witnesses also allowed descriptions and counter-arguments to be voiced that the regime actually intended to suppress.