Studying Female Islamic Authority: From Top-Down to Bottom-Up Modes of Certification

This article introduces a special issue on female Islamic authority in contemporary Asia. It provides an overview of the literature on religious authority in Islam and briefly lays out which modes of female religious authority have been more accepted than others in the schools of jurisprudence. Based on the articles included in this issue, the introduction makes two chief observations. First, in contrast to the overwhelming consensus among experts of Islamic law that women may serve as muftūn (plural of muftī), in most Muslim-majority societies today women are either seldom found in this role, or where there are muftīyāt (female muftūn), their role is confined to women’s issues. Second, while a growing body of academic studies has drawn attention to the recent phenomenon of state-instituted or -supported programs that train women in Islamic authority, little attention has been paid to the question of how communities react to such programs. The special issue is a call to study female religious authority from the bottom up, in order to better understand why believers, whether men or women, ascribe religious authority to women in some contexts and situations, but overwhelmingly still prefer male religious authority over female, despite the permissiveness for female juristic expertise in Islamic law.</p

A Theological Justification for Freedom of Religion and Belief as a Universal Right

This chapter explores the extent to which, in the light of this scholarship and the lack of universal application of FoRB, FoRB can still claim to be a universal right. It first explores FoRB’s claims to universalism in international, regional and national rights instruments. It then considers the theoretical basis for FoRB as a universal right in order to discover whether on a philosophical and theological level there are still grounds to support its claim to universalism. This is followed by an overview of the evidence which demonstrates that despite its universal nature in legal instruments and theory, FoRB is far from universally applied. To address this gap between aspirational rights norms and practice this chapter then considers a theory grounded in reformed theology to support FoRB as a universal right

The Unification of Law and the Postcolonial State

The article analyzes the evolution of state law pluralism in the field of personal status law in India and Indonesia in the postcolonial era. Having inherited pluri-legal personal law systems from their colonial patrons, postindependence leaders in both countries vowed to eliminate and replace pluri-legal arrangements by uniform civil law systems that would not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, custom, or religion. Despite their attempts at legal unification from the 1940s to 1960s, however, both nations today exhibit high degrees of state law pluralism in personal law. We show that plans for legal unification were abandoned in both countries in the 1970s, and that the turn away from legal unification was mostly driven by concerns of political stability and electoral politics, not, as is often argued in the literature, due to state incapacity or ideological reorientations on part of the ruling elite.KITLV in Leiden; Zi