Social scientists tend to ignore religion in the processes of post-Enlightenment modernization. In individual cases and events, the role of religious actors is clear—especially in the primary documents. Yet in broad histories and comparative analyses, religious groups are pushed to the periphery, only to pop out like a jack-in-the-box from time to time to surprise and scare people and then shrink back into their box to lettheimportanthistoricalchangesbedirectedby“secular” actors and forces (Butler 2004). Yet integrating religious actors and motivations into narratives about the rise and spread of both Western modernity and democracy helps solve perennial problems that plague current research.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055412000093

The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy

Instrumentalism, I argued earlier [Joppke, Christian. 2010a. “The Inevitable Lightening of Citizenship.” European Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 9–32.], is the heart of an ‘inevitable lightening’ of ...

The instrumental turn of citizenship

Islamic Economics and Finance: An Epistemological Inquiry is a scholarly work on the foundations of the role that the moral and ethical law plays on human enterprise comprising economics, finance, society and science. Divided into three parts, theoretical, empirical and application, the study covers a vast area of socio-scientific investigation and is extensively comparative in perspective. Its methodology is a mix of a textual, analytical, diagrammatic, mathematical and applied nature spanning various problems of Islamic economics, finance, society and science within a general-system worldview of unity of knowledge. This book presents multidimensional general-system conception, construction, formalism, application and inference as empirically viable and explainable and uses the language of philosophy of science and applied mathematical models alongside policy analysis. At a time when an epistemological study of the foundations of Islamic economics, finance, society and science is receiving crucial attention worldwide this text is equally accessible to the informed reader and the specialized one.

Islamic Economics and Finance: An Epistemological Inquiry

This article aims to question the role criminal justice and criminal law play in structuring the set of dominant conditioning questions in criminology. Based on socio-legal approaches and past fiel...

Beyond criminocentric dogmatism: Mapping institutional forms of punishment in contemporary societies

Excitation of a dynamical system : public-private partnerships in the non-ergodic Uganda

The Egyptian revolution is proving to be a very legal one. That is not to say that the revolution’s demands have been legalized, nor that Egypt’s law has been revolutionized, rather, the forces that have come to the fore since the toppling of Mubarak in Feb 2011 have chosen law as the privileged form through which to bargain with each other. The density of the legal back and fro has been overwhelming: constitutional amendments, constitutional supplementary declarations, parliamentary laws, legislative amendments, military decrees, court trials, constitutional court decisions overturning laws passed, conflicting decisions from various courts, presidential decrees, emergency laws annulled and then reclaimed in another form; in fact so much so, that to trace the historical unfolding of the Egyptian revolution, one would be wise to use the Gazette and law reports as one’s primary guide through the maze of events. It is hard to miss the fact that in the case of Egypt, no sooner the public space opened up for the political as an autonomous sphere – one that is only possible through genuine democratic practice – than that sphere became annexed by the legal.

Of Law and the Revolution

Over the past few years, Janet Halley emerged as one of the most avid critics of campus rape feminist activists, activists who push for the reformulation of university investigative rules to shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused. Halley contends that Title IX policies, embedded with affirmative consent, are not only procedurally unsound, but bad for boys, bad for sex, and bad for feminism, charging its agenda with “radical feminism” influences. Halley’s stance on campus rape is consistent with her long-held “queer theory” and its anti-feminist deregulatory drive. In this article, I argue that Halley’s “queer theory,” which she developed by polemically critiquing Catharine Mackinnon’s work, in an attempt to extol “sex positivism” in legal academia with the dignity of “fancy” theory, in effect stands Mackinnon on her head. By inverting Mackinnon’s gender/ sex constructions, Halley’s theory fronts as an idealist proposition indicting feminism with the invention of sexual injury and inspiring women to manipulate innocuous facts into scandalous protest.

Flipping Mackinnon’s equality approach when it comes to legal rules takes Halley to the right of “consent” where Mackinnon had gone to its “left.” By mirroring Mackinnon’s critique of “consent,” except from the right, Halley’s theorizing echoes a sexual libertarian agenda without/before feminism. It defends male sexual entitlement avant liberal feminism.

Ideologically, such theoretic formulations, along with the bundle of rules they advocate for, are designed to keep pressure on ruling liberal feminism from departing in its understanding of sex from the “pathology” model whereby all men are good except for those who are “pathologically” violent (classical liberalism) in the direction of understanding sexual entitlement as part of the social construction of maleness. By clamoring from the right of liberal feminism, mainstream liberal feminism is kept in check.

In order to explain the various elements of Halley’s theories on gender/sex and expose their underlying pre-feminist “classical liberal” orientation, I position her comparatively within the gender/sex theories of the non-liberal academic left: Mackinnon (her antagonist), Duncan Kennedy (her ally), and Judith Butler (her theoretical homebody). I analyze the way these theorists used the theoretical traditions of Marxism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism to posit a relationship between gender and sex: sex is gender simpliciter (Mackinnon), gender is sex simpliciter (Halley), and the split difference between gender and sex (Kennedy). This exercise illuminates the doctrinal approaches of each theory, be it to the left or right of consent. I conclude the article with a succinct critique of Halley’s theoretic excursions and argue Halley is guilty of five themes of “misrecognition:” (A) theoretical, oscillating between an antagonism to the very idea of sexual injury and proposing a neutral proceduralist approach to identifying it; (B) political, targeting radical feminism with her critique while smashing liberal feminism on the way; (C) sociological, reading women’s sexual injury through the eyes of an “uninjurable” promiscuous gay man advocating a radical sexual ideology; (D) ideological, attempting to ally her sexual libertarianism with the left when the ideological universe it travels is “classical liberalism,” definitively, the left’s most pronounced critic; and (E )historical, advocating a “sex positive” agenda in radically sex positivist times.

/pdf/janet-halley-and-the-art-of-status-quo-maintenance-4bn07zlbn8.pdf

Janet Halley and the Art of Status Quo Maintenance

Massad’s thesis is simple, in fact, perfect in its simplicity. Empire is a terrible force that wants to penetrate, overpower and hegemonize. It has a center, a headquarters if you like, the West. It functions with two arms: capitalism (later neoliberal) and Euro-American hegemony. The first arm represents the objective drive of capital that transforms sites and cultures as it spreads the market in the shape of commodity exchange. It has become a universal system, Massad contends, though with varying effects on the center (West) from the periphery (rest). Whereas its march on the former has been totally transformative, in the latter, only so. In the center, not only has capitalism become the dominant mode of production, but it has also, following Foucault, witnessed the emergence knowledges/powers that have instituted categories, binaries, taxonomies, in short, epistemologies that were unknown in the pre-capitalist era. These epistemologies produced new subjects. One of those was the hetero/homo distinction in which people came to know their “hetero/homosexuality” as their most inner truth.

/pdf/that-thing-that-you-do-comment-on-joseph-massad-s-empire-of-544jikuxi5.pdf

That Thing that You Do: Comment on Joseph Massad’s 'Empire of Sexuality'

Secularism’s Fault

Lynn Welchman's Beyond the Code is a very important book and a serious addition to the legal literature on family law in the contemporary Islamic world. Its most immediate task is to introduce to the reader the historical, institutional, and textual elements of the regulation of the family in the West Bank and Gaza of Palestine. It begins by surveying the history of codification of family law in this region, as well as the evolution of sharia courts in conjunction with secular courts, and proceeds to give a detailed account of how the marriage contract, marital life, and divorce are litigated in contemporary Palestine. It ends with a review of the debate on reforming family law in Palestine that was triggered by the signing of the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority as an expression, for the first time in history, of a Palestinian (pseudo-) sovereignty. True to its description on the back cover, the book “presents a systematic analysis of the application of Islamic family law [in Palestine] in nearly 10,000 marriage contracts, 1,000 deeds of Talaq or Khul and 2,000 judicial rulings over a time span that includes Jordanian rule and Israeli military occupation, updating this with material from the beginning of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.”

L YNN W ELCHMAN , Beyond the Code: Muslim Family Law and the Shar i Judiciary in the Palestinian West Bank (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000). Pp. 444. $160.00 cloth

Lama Abu-Odeh

Papers

Of Law and the Revolution

Janet Halley and the Art of Status Quo Maintenance

That Thing that You Do: Comment on Joseph Massad’s 'Empire of Sexuality'

Secularism’s Fault

L YNN W ELCHMAN , Beyond the Code: Muslim Family Law and the Shar i Judiciary in the Palestinian West Bank (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000). Pp. 444. $160.00 cloth