In Aligning Religious Law and State Law: Negotiating Legal Muslim Marriage in Pasuruan, East Java, Muhammad Latif Fauzi investigates the extent to which the Indonesian state has regulated Muslim marriage, how a local community in Pasuruan, East Java practices and negotiates the regulation and how local officials deal with their practices. Instead of reforming the Marriage Law which would only stir up controversies, the Indonesian government has used a citizens’ rights approach to control marriage and to guide people towards compliance with the state legal framework. In everyday practice of marriage bureaucracy, the state agency in charge of Muslim marriage registration needs to maintain its image as a body capable of maintaining the proper balance between religious tradition and modern administration of a marriage. The practice of Muslim marriage registration has still left some leeway in which informality can function. This informality is important as it offers the capacity to make a compromise between people’s deep interest in religious law and state law. The state officials in charge of marriage administration on the frontier levels are amenable to adopting lenient approach towards marriage registrations, which is the key to securing the functioning of state law.

This book examines major conceptual challenges confronting freedom of religion or belief in contemporary settings. It will be a valuable resource for students, academics, and policy-makers with an interest in law, religion, and human rights.

This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

This book aims to offer a critical perspective on the relationship between locally-based norms and state legal norms on Muslim marriage in Indonesia. It delves into how the state bureaucracy implements and how people negotiate laws on Muslim marriage.

Groundbreaking theoretical and legal approaches to resolving conflicts between gender equality and cultural practices

"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

This book explores the right to religious freedom within international law. Analysing legal structures in a variety of both Western and Non-Western jurisdictions, the book sets out a topography of the different constitutional structures of religion within the state and their compliance with international human rights law.

Previous efforts at legal development have focused almost exclusively on state legal systems, many of which have shown little improvement over time. Recently, organizations engaged in legal development activities have begun to pay greater attention to the implications of local, informal, indigenous, religious and village courts or tribunals, which often are more efficacious than state legal institutions, especially in rural communities. Legal pluralism is the term applied to these situations because these institutions exist alongside official state legal systems, usually in a complex or uncertain relationship. Although academics, especially legal anthropologists and sociologists, have discussed legal pluralism for decades, their work has not been consulted in the development context. This book brings together, in a single volume, contributions from academics and practitioners to explore the implications of legal pluralism for legal development.

This text presents a comparative, cross-cultural analysis of the legal status of religion in public education in eighteen different nations while offering recommendations for the future improvement of religious education in public schools. Offering rich, analytical insights from a range of renowned scholars with expertise in law, education, and religion, this volume provides detailed consideration of legal complexities impacting the place of religion and religious education in public education. The volume pays attention to issues of national and international relevance including the separation of the church and state; public funding of religious education; the accommodation of students’ devotional needs; and compulsory religious education. The volume thus highlights the increasingly complex interplay of religion, law, and education in diverse educational settings and cultures across developing and developed nations. Providing a valuable contribution to the field of religious secondary education research, this volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in religion and law, international and comparative education, and those involved with educational policy at all levels. Those more broadly interested in moral and values education will also benefit from the discussions the book contains.