Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to identify in the constant central core of Christian faith, despite the inquisition, despite anti-Semitism and despite the crusades, the principles of human dignity, tolerance and freedom, including religious freedom, and therefore, in the last analysis, the foundations of the secular State.

A European court should not be called upon to bankrupt centuries of European tradition. No court, certainly not this Court, should rob the Italians of part of their cultural personality.

In March, 2011, after five years of working its way through various levels of national and European courts, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decided that a crucifix hanging at the front of a classroom did not violate the right to religious freedom under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Specifically, Ms. Soile Lautsi had complained that the presence of the crucifix violated her and her children's right to religious freedom and that its presence amounted to an enforced religious regime. The Grand Chamber, reversing the lower Chamber's decision, held that while admittedly a religious symbol, the crucifix also represented the cultural heritage of Italians.

Every legal culture has its fundamental words. When we define our subject this weekend as human rights, we also locate ourselves in a normative universe at a particular place. The word “rights” is a highly evocative one for those of us who have grown up in the post-enlightenment secular society of the West. Even those among us who have been graced with a deep and abiding religious background can hardly have escaped the evocations that the terminology of “rights” carries. Indeed, we try in this conference, to take alittle credit here and there for the lustre which the edifice of rights reflects, perhaps suggesting now and again that the fine reflection owes something to some ultimate source of the light.

Judaism is, itself, alegal culture of great antiquity. It has hardly led a wholly autonomous existence these past three millennia. Yet, I suppose it can lay as much claim as any of the other great legal cultures to have an integrity to its basic categories. When I am asked to reflect upon Judaism and human rights, therefore, the first thought that comes to mind is that the categories are wrong. I do not mean, of course, that basic ideas of human dignity and worth are not powerfully expressed in the Jewish legal and literary traditions. Rather, I mean that because it is alegal tradition Judaism has its own categories for expressing through law the worth and dignity of each human being. And the categories are not closely analogous to “human rights.” The principal word in Jewish law, which occupies a place equivalent in evocative force to the American legal system's “rights”, is the word “mitzvah” which literally means commandment but has a general meaning closer to “incumbent obligation.”

The gulf in perception between Islamic and secular perspectives over the meaning of human rights is growing. Media reports and western governments repeatedly charge Muslim governments from Sudan to Iran of human rights violations. In some parts of the Muslim world, a string of events indeed suggest that the violation of human rights continue with little sign of immediate abatement. Tragedy is the overriding topos of the media attention that such events receive. The list can become endless, but I will only mention a few incidents in order to highlight the salient contexts and issues for the purposes of a discussion on human rights. The Turkish Muslim feminist Konca Kuris was kidnapped by a Turkish group known as the Hizbullah in 1998 and her dead body was found in 1999. In 1997 Egypt's highest court ruled that the writings of a Cairo University professor, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd were tantamount to apostasy. In 1992, Muslim militants assassinated the Egyptian human rights activist and essayist Farag Fouda. The 1980s witnessed the international imbroglio amounting to a debacle when Iran's clergy offered a ransom to anyone who would assassinate the Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie for writing novels that offended Muslim sensibilities. On a daily basis, spine chilling reports of death and civilian casualties perpetrated by Muslim militants and the military in Algeria bewilder observers after the army's subversion of the democratic process in that country. In many Muslim countries like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Tunisia, intellectuals are subjected to harassment by traditionalist and fundamentalist quarters alike as well as by governments for their critical study of religion and for opinions that do not meet with approval from the religious establishment. When human rights concerns are raised, officials from Muslim countries accuse the West of using a double standard in its application of human rights, of mounting the human right claim as an instrument of political power against nations who do not further its political and economic agendas.

In the United States, informal elder care is principally the responsibility of younger relatives. Adult children perform the majority of elder care and non-relatives perform only 14 percent of care. Caregiving in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, community follows a very different pattern that reflects the importance of “chosen family” in the lives of LGBT older adults. Instead of relying on relatives, LGBT older adults largely care for each other. Relatives provide only 11 percent of all elder care. This article explores the high level of caregiving by non-relatives in the LGBT community. It asks what motivates friends, neighbors, and community members to provide care for someone whom the law considers a legal stranger. It also asks what steps policy makers can take to facilitate and encourage this type of caregiving. Finally, it asks what lessons can be learned from LGBT older adults about the nature of both caregiving and community. As the aging population becomes more diverse, aging policies will have to become more inclusive to address the differing needs of various communities, including LGBT older adults. The potential lessons learned from the pattern of elder care in the LGBT community, however, extend far beyond a simple commitment to diversity.

Sir William Blackstone's hyperbolic defense of the common law rights of Englishmen to private property, drawn from the immutable law of nature, was a comfort to conservative lawyers in the early American republic as a reasoned philosophical and legal defense of property against the uncertainties of John Locke's social contract. The seeds of Jacksonian democracy, in which popular sovereignty went hand-in-hand with the people's self-evident right to the pursuit of happiness, threatened to relativize and erode the social position of the propertied class. In this situation American lawyers vigorously asserted absolute rights to property that could transcend the vagaries of politics.

“The title of our lands,” wrote Jesse Root proudly in 1798, “is free, clear and absolute, and every proprietor of land is a prince in his own domains, and lord paramount of the fee.”

In democratic countries where the law might be influenced by religious communities, family law cases can present one of the most sensitive and complex challenges. Religious laws governing personal status and the supervision of family relations are vital components of many religions and, in some cases, crucial to the cultural survival of the religious community. However, the family laws of some religions are discriminatory towards women, same-sex couples, people of other religions, and other groups. Currently, there is heated political and scholarly debate about the tension between the norms of multiculturalism, which dictate that religious communities be allowed to preserve their values and culture, including through autonomy over family law, and liberal norms prohibiting the discrimination that religious family law can perpetrate.

One of the best known liberal advocates for restricting discriminatory cultural practices of minority groups was Susan Moller Okin. Okin maintained that many cultural minorities are more patriarchal than the surrounding culture and that the female members of the patriarchal culture might be much better off were the culture into which they were born to become extinct, if, that is, it could not be altered so as to uphold women's equality. She pointed to religious personal law as one example of a sphere in which patriarchal cultures strive to maintain autonomy at the cost of women's and girls' freedom and basic rights. Consistent with her view, nation states should not give legal autonomy over family matters to patriarchal minorities unless these minorities reform their religious laws so as not to discriminate against or impair the rights of women and girls.

In this age of information technology that shrank our world into a global village, it is fair to ask how this recent development has impacted Muslim women's rights across the world. Having just traveled through nine Muslim countries, ranging from Pakistan and Bangladesh to the Gulf States, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, I would answer that it is leading, slowly but surely, to reassessment and change. Attempts to accelerate the pace of this change, however, without full understanding of its complex topology, and the deep-rooted commitment by most Muslim women to spiritual and cultural authenticity, could halt or even reverse this process at great cost to women particularly and Muslim societies as a whole. Hence the challenges and opportunities.

Today, there is little debate that a paradigm shift is occurring in the field of international conflict resolution; where experts laud the effectiveness of peaceful means ending disputes compared with the use of force or violence. This paradigm shift is reflected in the increasing number of peacebuilding academic and applied programs in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, South and East Asia, and the Middle East, including conflict resolution workshops, projects for building civil societies, and nonviolent resistance mobilization. In peacebuilding contexts, scholars and practitioners are seeking to integrate authentic, indigenous and local cultural methods of conflict analysis and intervention, which are replacing the generic conflict resolution applications developed by western practitioners in United States and Europe.

Hindu women's legal right to inherit property has been restricted from the earliest times in Indian culture. In the ancient text Manusmriti, Manu writes: “Her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth and her sons protect her in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.” However, women were not always excluded from inheriting movable or immovable property from ancestral and marital families. But their proportion of share in the property was far less than that of their male counterparts.

Throughout history, restrictions on Hindu women's property rights have undergone change, and current laws governing these rights are more liberal than those of ancient Hindu society. Patriarchal Hindu society provided women with property known as stridhan (literally, women's property or fortune), and it mainly came from marriage gifts (clothes, jewelry, and in some rare cases, landed properties). However, women were denied property rights to the ancestral or marital landed property, and their right over succession of the landed family property was limited. With the emergence of different schools of Hindu law, the concept of stridhan started expanding its literal and legal meaning, granting women more rights to certain forms of property. Later, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the passage of several pieces of legislation that were intended to remove more of the barriers to full and equal property rights for Hindu women. Most recently, sexual discrimination in Hindu succession rules was mostly discontinued by the recent Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act (2005).

Since women's rights first entered the agenda of the United Nations (“U.N.”), there has been a running tension between the expression and codification of those rights and the right to freedom of religion. Thus far, this tension has resulted in an uneasy relationship between U.N. instruments regarding religious rights and U.N. instruments on women's rights. The former stand mute with respect to the relationship between women's rights and religion. The latter are encumbered with substantial reservations by countries concerned with safeguarding their religious tenets and traditions.

This paper will examine the tension between women's rights and religious rights as expressed in certain State Parties' reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (“CEDAW”) that are based on Islamic Law and the extent to which CEDAW can ensure adherence to its norms while recognizing the right to freedom of religion or belief. The article does not purport to offer any authoritative commentary of Islamic law. Rather, its objective is to highlight connections between CEDAW's tenets, the nature of Islam-based reservations, and the course of women's lives in certain reserving countries.

There is a great deal of confusion in the West regarding the meaning of Jihad and the role it is playing in shaping the Muslim world. Indeed, it has acquired a pejorative connotation in the minds of many Westerners. The purpose of this discussion is to present an accurate understanding of the concept of Jihad.

Islam emerged in the seventh century in Arabia. It grew rapidly and in less than a hundred years established the early Islamic state—an empire stretching from Spain across North Africa, and from the Middle East to the borders of China. It was a state greater in size than the Roman Empire at its zenith.

The historical importance assigned to Islam has been controversially assessed. Some have denied that it is a significant world force, others have “grudgingly” recognized its importance while others have seen it as a pivotal event in world history. We take this latter view: Islam should be recognized as a major force of revolutionary change in the world order. Harold Berman, a contemporary commentator on law and revolution in the west, gives a list of six revolutions which changed the Western world. He provides a helpful list of patterns which emerged from those revolutions which he identifies as fundamental change, rapid change, violent change, lasting change, and change in the whole social system. Each revolution sought a legitimacy in fundamental law, a remote past, and an apocalyptic future. Each took more than one generation to establish its roots. Each eventually produced a new system of law which embodied some of the major purposes of the revolution and which changed the Western legal tradition, without destroying it. The appearance of Islam in the seventh century meets these criteria. Using Berman's framwork Islam can be viewed as truly revolutionary.

The year 2006 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. In her recent report to the United Nations General Assembly, Asma Jahangir, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, stated that despite the time that has elapsed since the Declaration was drafted, it “seems evident that contentious religious issues have not only evolved but also become more acute in many societies.” In a report submitted to the Commission on Human Rights in late 2004, the Special Rapporteur listed “the continuing violations of human rights of members of certain religious minorities, as well as the still widely applied practice of forced conversion” among the main concerns in the area of freedom of religion. Jahangir said that she considers that “such a practice breaches the strongest and most fundamental part of freedom of religion or belief and should be given greater attention by the international community.”

In May 2005 the Special Rapporteur made an in situ visit to Sri Lanka—a country where the issue of unethical conversions has fueled religious tensions in recent years. Approximately 69% of Sri Lanka's population are Buddhists, followed by Hindus (15%), Christians (8%), Muslims (7%) and others (1%). Despite such a majority, the ethnic conflict which has affected Sri Lanka for decades, and which began to escalate again in December 2005 and throughout 2006-07, has been largely devoid of a religious element: relations between the different religious groups have for some time been relatively peaceful. This religious co-existence has, however, begun to deteriorate, due largely to the issue of unethical conversions and a desire to protect the majority religion.

The statutory prohibition against ritual slaughter, which does not stun the animal prior to slaughter, as required in most Western nations, poses a significant challenge for the international right to freedom of religion or belief in European nation-states. This prohibition is important not only in Europe, or because of the prohibition itself, but because it implicates the legal status of two minority religious communities in these nation-states, those of Judaism and Islam. Some animal rights advocates have objected to ritual slaughter without stunning because, in their view, it causes needless suffering by the animal, and they have been successful in getting their views enacted into law in a number of European countries. Indeed, some countries prohibit ritual slaughtering altogether, as we shall discuss below.

This paper argues that the right to freedom of religion or belief requires nation-states to respect the rights of religious minorities that engage in ritual slaughter, even if they recognize the importance of avoiding unnecessary suffering of animals. Following a review of the legal status of animals in rights discourse generally, we will show why the prohibition of ritual slaughter needlessly results in discrimination against religious minorities, and why it is important that nation-states attempting to reduce animal suffering more clearly specify realistic alternatives for avoiding such suffering that are compatible with current religious mandates about animal slaughter. We will also consider whether the alternative of importing kosher or halal meat in place of ritual slaughtering, proposed by some nation-states as a method of alleviating the harm to religious minorities, is an effective and fair alternative.

The debate surrounding the so-called “right to die” has commanded increasing public attention over the last decade. Opinion polls in many Western democracies would appear to show increasing support for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and a number of recent legal developments have further advanced the cause. As a result of court decisions since 1984, euthanasia has been legally permissible in the Netherlands; physician-assisted suicide was legalized in the State of Oregon in 1994 as a result of a ballot initiative, and in 1995 a voluntary euthanasia Bill was passed in the Northern Territory, Australia. But, even more recently, the “right to die” campaign has suffered reverses. The implementation of the Oregon legislation has been halted by a Federal court pending a determination of its constitutionality; the Northern Territory legislation was overturned by the Australian federal parliament in 1997, and in July 1997 the United States Supreme Court, reversing the decisions of lower courts, declared that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

To even begin suggesting that a natural law tradition exists in Islamic law, one has to overcome the hurdles set by those who avowedly deny that such a tradition exists. Respected Islamicists such as Patricia Crone and the late George Makdisi have stated in no uncertain terms that there is no natural law tradition in Islam. Presumably what they mean by this claim is that there is no “orthodox” tradition whereby premodern Muslims (e.g. ca. ninth-sixteenth century CE) allowed human beings to speak on behalf of the divine without recourse to scripture. Reason does not assume any ontological authority akin to that of scripture that would justify using it as a basis for finding, determining and constructing obligations that emanate from the divine.

In a sense, they are right. The dominant Positivist thesis, as expressed in premodern usul al-fiqh or legal theory, holds that where there is no scripture on a matter, one is left in a state of legal suspension (tawaqquf); there is no epistemically coherent way to determine the divine law on that matter, and consequently no one is in a sufficient epistemic position to attribute to God a ruling of any normative force. Fundamentally, this position enshrines within Islamic law a strict scriptural positivism. Jurists argued that all determinations of God's law must find expression, either directly or indirectly, from scripture. Extrascriptural indices, whether in the form of rational proofs or references to nature, do not provide a proper basis or foundation for asserting the divine law.

This article examines South Sudan's experiment in creating a secular state out of the ashes of the professedly Islamic republic from which it seceded in 2011. South Sudanese political actors presented secularism as a means of redeeming the nation from decades of religious excess in which the government conflated political imperative with theological ambition, claiming to save the nation from its woes through the unifying force of Islam. However, secularism as an alternative soteriology—one that contended that it is only through political nonalignment in regards to religion that the public could be saved from the problems that plagued its predecessor—quickly became an object of contention itself, read by many South Sudanese to be anything but neutral. This article interrogates the secular promise of mediating religious diversity through exploring the tensions that have arisen in its fulfillment at the birth of the world's newest republic.

Not so very long ago, the idea of religious freedom enjoyed all the self-evident virtue of a Norman Rockwell painting. Sure, Americans disagreed about what it meant in practice, leaving their Supreme Court to hash out the details. Still, however Americans differed in their religious beliefs, they espoused religious freedom and insisted that it cannot be government's job to promote any one religious sect over others or coerce anyone's conscience in religious matters. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” thundered Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1943, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”1 For a time, this consensus seemed poised to embrace the entire world. When in November 1949 Eleanor Roosevelt proudly held up for public view a poster-size copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including its article on “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” one might have been forgiven for thinking that all the peoples of the earth were ready to follow her matronly instruction.2

Heightened awareness in the United States about Islam and Muslims presents an opportunity to explore issues in Islamic Law, and particularly to examine the concepts that underlie Islamic law. This study is an effort to present briefly the controlling principles of Islamic Contract Law. In view of the monumental growth of trade between the Western and the Muslim worlds and projected increase in the coming century, the subject should continue to be of particular interest.

The doctrinal basis of Islamic law is the point of departure for this study. A brief historical sketch reveals the doctrinally-based components that have evolved into Islamic law. Islamic belief begins with Prophet Muhammad, the Messenger of God (Allah). The Prophet's mission was to establish an order in this world based on divine revelations made to him by God (Allah). These divine revelations are recorded in the Quran, the sole scripture of the Muslims. The spiritual and secular practices of the Prophet came to be known as Sunna. These two sources constitute the main guidelines for spiritual as well as temporal Muslim conduct in this life as a preparation for the hereafter, and are called Sharia. The word Sharia means the highway to good life. Over a period of time two additional sources of Sharia came into existence. They are: 1) Qiyas, or analogical reasoning, and 2) Ijma, or consensus of the Islamic community on a point of law. According to Sharia, sovereignty vests in God (Allah), requiring the state to act within the limits of divine law, or Sharia. This sovereignty is recognized by incorporation of Sharia into the Islamic legal system and community. In this sense Sharia is the constitutional law of a Muslim society.

Although historically, the phenomenon of spiritual healing emerged as a religious practice within the context of specific religious traditions and has traditionally been ascribed only to mystics, saints, and holy persons, in modern times, a variety of spiritual healing practices unconnected with traditional religion have entered mainstream professional health care. These practices are used in a variety of health care professions, from medicine to nursing, dentistry, and other allied health professions.

For example, some physicians either collaborate with (or refer to) spiritual healers or use “‘healing energy’ through touch” without naming a particular style, school, or technique, and a spiritual healing modality known as Therapeutic Touch is part of the curriculum in many nursing schools. Use of caring or healing touch is increasingly described as potentially useful in various health care settings, from acute care, to surgery, to obstetrical nursing practice; and Reiki, a Japanese form of energy healing, has even been used in efforts to help survivors recover from torture.