Photo of Kaifeng North Mosque by Windmemories (CC BY-SA 4.0) The following essay is reprinted and adapted on Canopy Forum in collaboration with the journal Derecho en Sociedad, a biannual electronic publication that is free and open access. See other essays in this series here. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese Communist Party…
Main chamber of Badshahi Mosque by User:Amjad.m (CC BY-SA 3.0) On January 16th, 2025, the government of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, demolished a historic Ahmadi mosque in the city of Daska. This mosque was built by Zafrullah Khan (1893-1985), Pakistan’s first foreign minister and one of the founding fathers of the country. This is…
Russian Orthodox Church, Rocklea, Russia by Bert Knot (CC 2.0) This article is part of our series on Transnational Christian Nationalism, and its impact on politics, the rule of law, and religious freedom. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. For many years, Russia has been known as one of the main…
Image by Mariya Popovich from Pixabay This article is part of our “Religious Perspectives on Assisted Reproduction and Surrogacy” series. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. While a great deal has already been written about cross-racial surrogacy and surrogacy in India, there are, however, no significant or credible studies concerning gestational surrogacy from…
Nuremburg Trials Protocols by David Shay (CC BY 3.0 DEED) Prologue Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Rackman (b. 1910, d. 2008) was a unique figure in the Orthodox Jewish community. Besides his well-known intellectual brilliance, he was involved with nearly every important Orthodox organization in America for many decades and then moved to Israel to be the…
Islam, Women, and Genderization in Professions: The Case of UzbekistanRahimjon Abdugafurov The following is an excerpt from Rahimjon Abdugafurov’s chapter titled, “Islam, Women, and Genderization in Professions: The Case of Uzbekistan” featured in The Political Economy of Education in Central Asia, an open access collection of essays on Central Asia. Reprinted here with permission from…
A sign with “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan Azadi) in Central and Northern Kurdish by Pirehelokan (CC BY-SA 4.0). As a scholar in the field of Islamic studies and material culture since the early 1990s, I have continually read and written about veiling and the hijab in Muslim cultures. In Iran, the hijab has had…
Demonstration for Uyghur rights in Berlin by Leonhard Lenz (CC0 1.0). Uyghurs are a Muslim Turkic people who have been living for a few millennia in East Turkistan or Uyghuristan, which was called Xinjiang (New Territories) in the Chinese language following Chinese invasion. The Uyghur nation has members of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Tajiks, and…
Prambanan Temple Complex in Yogyakarta Indonesia. Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas. (CC BY-SA 3.0). Political theory in premodern South Asia settled on a single model of governance at a relatively early date: kingship. This was so in large part because those who defined and controlled the intellectual and religious institutions of the day, the Brahmins,…
“Amir Kabir University Uprising September 2022” by Darafsh. (CC BY-SA 4.0). How much can a religious-political system control its citizens? The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) legally required the hijab in 1983. Later, in 1996 and 2014, amendments were made to the penal code of Iran, but this law remained in place. According to the…