Islamic Law In Europe

Cultural and religious identity and family law are inter-related in a number of ways and raise various complex issues. European legal systems have taken various approaches to meeting these challenges. This book examines this complexity and indicates areas in which conflicts may arise by analysing examples from legislation and court decisions in Germany, Switzerland, France, England and Spain. It includes questions of private international law, comments on the various degrees of consideration accorded to cultural identity within substantive family law, and remarks on models of legal pluralism and the dangers that go along with them. It concludes with an evaluation of approaches which are process-based rather than institution-based. The book will be of interest to legal professionals, family law students and scholars concerned with legal pluralism.

11 Concluding remarks, Giorgio Conetti

Islam, Europe and Emerging Legal Issues brings together vital analysis of the challenges that Europe poses for an expanding Islam and that Islam poses for Europe, within their ever-evolving religious, legal, and social environments. This book gathers some of the best thinking on Islam and the law affecting current and contested issues that can no longer be ignored, particularly as they have found their way before the European Court of Human Rights. Contributors include leading authorities who are working at the heart of this generation's law and religion questions in Europe and across the world. This book outlines implications for all those who look to Europe-from both within and without-for models of human rights implementation and multi-cultural accommodation.

This book addresses some of the fundamental issues borne of the several million strong Muslim presence in Europe in our times. Based on a thorough study of Islamic sources, it seeks to answer basic questions about a European Muslim’s social, political, cultural and legal life as a practising Muslim while living together in multi-faith, pluralistic European nation states.

In all countries of the European Union, the Muslim communities, numbering about 15,000,000 people, represent a substantial religious minority, although it is a very varied group, both in terms of religious practice and national origin. The very weight of this minority forces the legal systems to come to terms with its presence. However, these changes are highly diversified and are evolving rapidly, not necessarily towards greater tolerance. This volume provides a brief sketch of these changes, describing the situation of some member countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and UK) and of one of the enlargement candidate countries, Romania. The book also contains an initial attempt at comparison between European countries and the USA and an overall analysis of the problems posed by the Islamic presence in Europe and the strategies to manage them. This work allows readers to draw some general conclusions on convergences and divergences within the European Union and the factors that determine them.

The public visibility of Islam is becoming increasingly controversial throughout European countries. With case studies drawn from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, this book examines a range of public issues, including mosque construction, ritual slaughter, Sharia councils and burqa bans, addressing the question of ’Islamic difference’ in public life outside the confines of established normative discourses that privilege freedom of religion, minority rights or multiculturalism. Acknowledging the creative role of dissent, it explores the manner in which public controversies unsettle the religious-secular divide and reshape European norms in the domains of aesthetics, individual freedom, animal rights and law. Developing an innovative conceptual framework and elaborating the notion of controversy as a methodological tool, Islam and Public Controversy in Europe draws our attention to the processes of interaction, confrontation and mutual transformation, thereby opening up a new horizon for rethinking difference and pluralism in Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in religion, integration, cultural difference and the public sphere.

In How Muftis Think Lena Larsen explores fatwas that respond to questions asked by Muslim women in Western Europe in recent decades. The questions show women to be torn between two opposing notions of morality and norms: one stressing women’s duties and obedience, and one stressing women’s rights and equality before the law. Focusing on muftis who see “the time and place” as important considerations in fatwa-giving, and seek to develop a local European Islamic jurisprudence on these increasingly controversial issues, Larsen examines how they deal with women’s dilemmas. Careful not to suggest easy answers or happy endings, her discussion still holds out hope that European societies and Muslim minorities can recognize shared moral concerns.

This volume exposes some of the various issues raised in relation to Muslim communities in Europe by putting the intellectual and legal traditions into dialogue. It brings together a number of scholars of Shari’a and Islamic law with counterparts from the parallel European disciplines of hermeneutics, philosophy and jurisprudence, to explore how the processes of theological-legal thinking have been expressed and are being expressed in a more or less common intellectual framework. It provides a valuable reference for all those interested in exploring how Muslims and non-Muslims view Shari’a law, looking at ways the European legal systems can provide some form of accommodation with Muslim customs.

In 2001, the European Consortium of Church and State Research focused its annual meeting on the highly topical issue of the legal position of Muslim communities in the European Union. The present book comprises updated analyses on Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Austria and the United Kingdom. The studies extend from general questions of legal status to specific issues such as building mosques or cemeteries, ritual slaughter, and from language rights to family issues and education, thus providing an in-depth view of the legal framework for a developing European Islam.

How religious barriers stalled capitalism in the Middle East In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind—in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions. Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life—including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies—all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history—will take generations to overcome. The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.