This book traces the history of the Dār al-Iftā, the Egyptian State Mufti's administration, from its inception in the 1890s to the present. Often uncomfortably positioned between a state bureaucracy and an emerging Muslim public concerned with the transmission of Islamic values, the various State Muftis have been striving to reinterpret Islamic law and demonstrate its relevance in the modern age. The history of the Dār al-Iftā thus provides a rare insight into major themes of 20th-century Islamic thinking. Four case studies demonstrate how fatwas can be used as sources for legal, social, intellectual and mentality history. Defining Islam for the Egyptian State will be of great interest to students of Islamic law and social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East.

In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.

Based on Islamist writings, political tracts, and interviews with Islamists, this book examines Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt from the perspective of Islamic conceptions of citizenship, and provides non-Muslim responses to those views.

The important issue of state-religion relationship in the Middle East is investigated through a sophisticated analysis of state fatwas and of the public and institutional role of the Egyptian State Mufti from 1895 to present.

A discussion of the constitutional jurisprudence of an important Egyptian jurist of the M lik school, Shih b al-D n al-Qar f .

By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law. Rachel M. Scott analyzes the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She argues that the sharia is not dismantled by the modern state when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, but rather recast in its service. In showing the particular forms that the sharia takes when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, Scott pushes back against assumptions that introductions of the sharia into modern state law result in either the revival of medieval Islam or in its complete transformation. Scott engages with premodern law and with the Ottoman legal legacy on topics concerning Egypt's Coptic community, women's rights, personal status law, and the relationship between religious scholars and the Supreme Constitutional Court. Recasting Islamic Law considers modern Islamic state law's discontinuities and its continuities with premodern sharia. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: very good, University of Vienna (Institute for Politcal Science), course: African Political Systems, language: English, abstract: In the vast field of political culture on the one hand and public participation, respectively democratisation, on the other hand I will start by limiting the field of my study by defining its aims. My first guiding thesis is that there is a cleavage between state and society in Egypt and I want to show some aspects and dimensions of its present status and its historical origins. The two central fields of my study will be firstly the actual secular state practice and its ideological origins and secondly Islam, its influence in Egyptian society, and its compatibility to liberal trends, the concept of civil society or democracy in general. To look at public participation in any state is an ambitious task, for the field of participation is broad and hard to measure. I will deal with political public participation. Public participation can be limited to social groups, like syndicates. By aims I am referring to the fact that different groups have different participatory intentions. This aspect becomes more interesting when looking at Islamist groups. Looking at public participation is at the same time looking at democratic processes and political culture of the society being analysed. This includes regarding in what way the preconditions for political participation are provided: Freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of press and last but not least education. Political culture includes as well many cultural aspects of the society analysed, here Islam comes in as a religion as well as a theoretical system for a society respectively a state. All those being components of political culture, the basic research questions are consequently: What is public participation, or rather what will be the definiti