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.

John C. Pollack, summarizing a study conducted by the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, declared that “moral issues through religion have vaulted to the forefront of political dialogue.” and he concluded, “Something unusual is happening.”

Indeed, Pollack seems right that “Something unusual is happening.” The sharpness with which moral issues have entered into political dialogue is perhaps unprecedented since the slavery issue. Not an insignificant amount of the dialogue and surely an aspect of its unusualness is the entrance of evangelicals into the political arena—a presence again that looks for precedents as far back as the anti-slavery crusades.

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).

The Bible is generally recognized as the foundation and point of departure for later Jewish and Christian religious and moral understandings. Nevertheless, both conservative and liberal schools within these traditions have tended to assume that biblical religion has to do only with humankind. Much of Western secular philosophy likewise has been pre-occupied exclusively with the human situation. In recent years, many theologians and ethicists have begun to trace the roots of emerging environmental concerns back to biblical sources. Several excellent studies have resulted from this movement. None, however, has focused on biblical laws and covenants.

Commonly, biblical laws are thought to refer solely to Israel's relation with God (or Yahweh) and the structuring of relationships within the Israelite community. The term “covenant” generally refers to those reported occasions in biblical times when God designated Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants, as his particular people, and laid upon them certain obligations, typically in the form of laws. Yet a great many biblical laws refer to treatment of animals, the land, trees, and vegetation. And two major biblical covenants embrace not only the people of Israel, but all human beings and all living creatures.

On 30 May 1994 Pope John-Paul II declared that the discussion on ordaining women was “definitively” closed. Women could not become priests, the Vatican repeated for the “very last” time. This event stimulated an unprecedented commotion in the Flemish (Belgian) Catholic community. The laity voluntarily working in the Church even threatened to strike. The debate on feminism and human rights within the Roman Catholic Church erupted more fiercely than ever before. The laity reacted in an astonishingly radical manner. The bishops tried to hold a position in between the displeased Catholics and the Vatican. An analysis of the debates held on these issues in the Flemish newspapers shows that the human rights discourse and the Vatican doctrine were worlds apart. Nevertheless, progressive Catholics tried to create a new discourse that was able to combine both perspectives. In this article, the interrelations between the several discourses and the dynamics of the debate are discussed, using the “commonwealth model” of Boltanski and Thévenot. It is argued that their model is useful but inadequate, because of its lack of attention to power and its ahistoricism.

The effects of Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith, the 1990 Supreme Court free exercise decision, were felt far beyond the members of the Native American Church who were denied the right to ingest peyote as part of a religious ritual. Smith held that as long as a statute was generally applicable and not directed at religion, it would be upheld, regardless of whether it infringed on a religious practice. This unexpectedly broad and severe opinion of the Court galvanized a large number of diverse religious groups as well as various civil rights organizations and the eventual result of their efforts was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a bill designed to restore free exercise law to its pre-Smith state.

While the RFRA seemed initially to have almost universal backing, it eventually met resistance from various Catholic and anti-abortion groups which feared it could be used to argue for the right to a religiously-motivated abortion. More recently, concerns were expressed regarding the bill's effect on the rights of prisoners. However, despite the concerns, the bill passed both the House and Senate by wide margins and has been signed into law by President Clinton.

The papers that follow were presented on April 27, 1996, at a conference entitled “Religious Freedom, Modern Democracy, and the Common Good” and devoted to Franklin I. Gamwell's The Meaning of Religious Freedom: Modern Politics and the Democratic Resolution (Albany: SUNY, 1995). The conference was sponsored by the Lilly Endowment and held at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis.

Gamwell's constructive proposal is significant not as a further nuance on settled ways of understanding the relation of religion and politics in the United States, but rather as an explicit attempt to unsettle the current consensus in approaching this issue itself. As Gamwell shows, the contemporary discussion is dominated by so-called separationist and religionist understandings that alike assume, rather than argue, that religion is “nonrational.” He engages positions representing the entire spectrum of such understandings, including the “privatist” view of John Rawls, the “partisan” view of John Courtney Murray, and the “pluralist” view of Kent Greenawalt, in order to demonstrate that such a nonrational approach makes it impossible democratically not only to assert, but also to give coherent meaning to the political principle of religious freedom.

In our western judicial system, inherited from Roman Law, it is consent, and consent alone, which creates marriage. It is only a small step from the idea that it is the exchange of consent which creates marriage to the idea of marriage as a contract. In the canonical doctrine of the Code of 1917, the contractual nature of marriage was simply taken for granted. Yet, this contract was sui generis because there can be no mutual recision once the parties contractually agree by their consent. In addition, the marriage contract has special characteristics: it is necessary for the human race, it is of itself sacred, it deeply concerns the public order, it is restricted to members of the opposite sex and to the number (two) of contractants, and it is bilateral and reciprocal. These conditions specify the contract.

In the 1917 Code of Canon Law, it was consent which gave rise to the marriage contract. This consent had to be manifested by persons who are capable of consent: jure habiles. This code did not speak of a specific capability relative to marriage. The reality of capability, however, was known because it arose from natural law. For Cardinal Gasparri, author of the 1917 Code, someone born blind, deaf, and dumb is an idiot who is assimilated to a child and therefore is incapable of contracting marriage.