Margalla Hills in Pakistan by Zach Khan (CC BY-SA 4.0). In early April 2026, Pakistan accomplished what few states in the contemporary international system have managed: it brought the United States and Iran, two nations defined by decades of mistrust, ideological divergence, and intermittent confrontation to the same negotiating table. This was more than an…
Intercultural Conference. Photo by provided by author. 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. Their issue 20(1) features full length articles in Spanish and English. Read Pinna’s long-form essay here.See other essays in this series here. Religion permeates every function…
Sunset over Pangkor Island, Malaysia (CC0 1.0). Insurance forms the foundation of modern economies, transforming uncertainty into manageable obligations, allocating risk, and stabilizing market. Yet conventional insurance, built on secular commercial frameworks, often clashes with Islamic legal and ethical norms. In many, Muslim-majority societies, however, conventional insurance has religious concerns. Classical jurisprudence prohibits riba (interest),…
Bangly Regency, Bali, Indonesia by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas (CC BY-SA 3.0). Indonesia’s constitutional order reflects one of the most ambitious contemporary efforts to govern religious diversity through law. As an archipelagic state encompassing over 17,000 islands and hundreds of ethnoreligious communities, Indonesia has long confronted the institutional challenge of recognizing religious authority within a plural legal…
Supreme Court of Pakistan by Guilhem Vellut (CC BY 2.0). The pursuit of justice is often described as a journey toward truth, yet in the context of Pakistan’s legal landscape, that journey is frequently stalled by the heavy burdens of delay, exorbitant costs, and procedural complexity. As the backlog of cases in the superior and…
Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan by King Elliot (CC BY-SA 4.0). Since its founding in 1947, Pakistan’s trajectory on women’s rights has been marked by a persistent tension between constitutional promises of equality and periods of legal ambiguity. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan affirms women’s equal status before the law, political participation, and…
Shah Faisal Mosque, Islamabad, Pakistan via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s legal system presents a distinctive pluralistic model, intertwining secular common law inherited from British colonial rule with Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh, under a single constitutional framework. The 1973 Constitution declares Islam as the state religion and mandates that all…
Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan by Françoise Foliot (CC BY-SA 4.0). The right of women to participate in communal prayers is explicitly affirmed and encouraged within Islamic sources, particularly the Prophetic traditions. Historically, women actively participated in congregational prayers alongside the Prophet and his Companions, praying collectively under the same roof. Across the Sunni legal schools,…
This image is an AI-generated depiction based on descriptions of similar events. The recent renewed public outrage over a video showing the brutal execution of Bano Bibi and her alleged partner, Ehsan Ullah, has once again brought the issue of honor killings to the forefront. These murders, which were ordered in May 2025 by a…
Russell Senate Office Building by Architect of the Capitol (US-PD). During his second term, President Barack Obama attempted to restart the Israel-Palestine peace process, following in the footsteps of every president since George H.W. Bush. Like other attempts, it fell apart quickly, much to the frustration of all. In April of 2014, then U.S. Secretary…