Photo by Marko Beljan on Unsplash. Over the last three decades of work in the fields of law, religion, and human rights, I have been privileged to work with fellow scholars with a range of views on what is known in the United States as “religious freedom.” In my work with scholars outside the U.S.,…
Pope Francis speaking at the Presidential Palace in Baghdad, March 5th, 2021. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0). Any way you look at it, Pope Francis’ March trip to Iraq had the appearances of being rash and even reckless on the surface. This Mideast country has been ravaged by years of war and rocked more recently like…
Photo by Sajjad Ahmad on Unsplash. Offering a cup of tea to a stranger is universally viewed as an act of hospitality. Except if you are a Baha’i in Iran, where this kindness can result in torture, imprisonment, or death, both for the offeror and the recipient. The danger springs from the recent escalation of a government-led propaganda campaign meant to instigate…
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash. Do Muslims pray even when they are not required to by “shari’a”? Or is being a Muslim a matter of performing exclusively compulsory religious acts, punctually and “to a T,” lest one get punished by the dreaded, bearded, and scowling “shari’a”? For reasons that we need not review here,…
Photo from Unsplash When Japan set out to reinvent itself as a modern nation-state in the second half of the 19th century, the new generation of policymakers had to navigate a plethora of foreign concepts as the vocabulary of Western thought was translated into Japanese. While many of these concepts were essentially new philosophical outlooks…
Image by cocoColin from Pixabay This article is part of our “Self-Defense and Human Rights” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. This piece contributes to David Little’s claim that the right of self-defense is universally acknowledged by analyzing the subtle idea of self-defense in the book of Mencius,…
Photo by jaefrench on Pixabay This article is part of our “Reflecting on COVID-19” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. As COVID-19 tightens its lethal grip on the globe, a palpable tension emerges between the authority of governmental officials in every state in the U.S. who have issued guidelines limiting social interactions to…
Dār al-Islām Revisited: Territoriality in Contemporary Islamic Legal Discourse on Muslims in the West by Sarah Albrecht Review by David R. Blumenthal Albrecht begins her very fine study with a methodological introduction, a summary of the various pre-modern views of territoriality in Islam, and an overview of various Islamic views on territoriality in the modern…
Photo by Pixabay on Pixabay (CCO) An earlier version of this essay was published here, on Diresom. This article is part of our “Reflecting on COVID-19” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. On February 19, 2020, I received the first of many phone calls from the media about a new…