Ijtihad Network Being Wise and Faithful Muslim in the Contemporary World
This book argues that Muslims recreate, reconstruct, redefine and restructure their Muslim laws as unofficial laws even within a secular or modern framework and thus undermine and obstruct, in various ways, the claim of official law to be the unique regulator of human behaviour in any given social field.
The book titled “Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal Pluralisms in England, Turkey and Pakistan” identifies Muslims current socio-legal situation and their legal attitudes from different perspectives. The main aim of this study is to analyze the conflict between the assumptions of modern legal systems and plural legal realities. While there is a reconstruction of unofficial Muslim laws in the modern and officially uniform secular legal systems of England and Turkey, in the case of Pakistan, where Islamic laws are recognized to a great extent, legal reform attempts in the areas of Muslim family law by the Islamic Pakistani state have so far not been successful and have led to intense clashes. The study shows that Muslims in these countries react to the modern frameworks of legal systems and do not abandon their locally formulated and interpreted Muslim laws. State formulations and interpretations of Islamic law, as in the case of Pakistan, or its more or less total disregard, as in the cases of Britain and Turkey, lead people to reconstruct their own unofficial Muslim laws.
In these three scenarios, modern legal systems try to impose official laws, yet face the resistance of unofficial Muslim laws. The study argues that Muslims recreate, reconstruct, redefine and restructure their Muslim laws as unofficial laws even within a secular or modern framework and thus undermine and obstruct, in various ways, the claim of official law to be the unique regulator of human behaviour in any given social field. The main objective of the study is to show that there will always be dynamic legal pluralism stemming from unofficial Muslim laws.
About the Author
Ihsan Yilmaz, research Chair of Islamic Studies and Intercultural Dialogue at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. His research is focused on Islam-state-society relations in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Central Asia along with research into political participation and legal pluralism in Muslim minority communities, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia. Professor Yilmaz is one of the Muslim World’s leading social scientists, especially on Islam, secularism, Muslim minorities in the West and Islamic legal pluralism. He has published 7 books, 40 refereed journal articles, 27 book chapters and has presented 60 conference papers. Professor Yilmaz has supervised or examined 26 PhD theses on Islam-Law-Society-Politics. His work appeared in international scholarly prestigious journals such as British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Journal, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Muslim World, Journal for Islamic Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs and Third World Quarterly.
Bibliographic Information
Title: Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal Pluralisms in England, Turkey and Pakistan
Author: Ihsan Yilmaz
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Length: 272
ISBN: 978-0754643890
Pub. Date: January 28, 2005
