Over the past two decades a number of Israeli institutions of higher education have opened gender-segregated programs for the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim. The growth of these programs has generated an intense debate in Israel, reflected throughout Israeli media and in several appeals to Israel's Supreme Court. The issues raised concerning gender-segregated higher education reflect an overarching inquiry that is of great interest to multicultural theoreticians: the relationship of liberal democracies to their illiberal minorities. Multicultural theoreticians agree that healthy democracies must tolerate some illiberal practices while acknowledging that not every illiberal practice can be tolerated. In the case at hand, the essay addresses the question: can a liberal democracy tolerate gender-segregated higher education? Using work by Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, John Inazu, and others, the essay reviews the arguments for and against gender segregation in higher education for Israeli haredim. The essay explores the limits of toleration of illiberal cultures within liberal democratic societies and finds crucial the right to exit such a culture—a right whose viability is dependent upon adequate education. The essay concludes by discussing the multiculturalism organization development model and what has been termed the manyness and messiness of multiculturalism.

The legal treatises of ancient India, called Dharmaśāstras, are often read as records of the initial emergence of law from religion in South Asia. The Dharmaśāstras teach the dharma, or “sacred duty,” of different members of society. It is one of the dharmas of the king to adjudicate disputes that come before his courts, and it is widely accepted that a need to articulate the king's dharma led the composers of the Dharmaśāstras over time to fashion rules for state courts, a body of law called vyavahāra. Scholars such as Henry Sumner Maine and Max Weber saw in the Dharmaśāstras evidence of the disentanglement and rationalization of law, respectively. A close examination of our sources, however, shows that the law of royal courts emerged not within the Dharmaśāstra tradition, but within an adjacent and decidedly more secular tradition of statecraft. It was gradually absorbed into Dharmaśāstra texts, where it was reconfigured as sacred duty and its historical origins were obscured. This article argues that the early history of state law in India is best described, therefore, not as a transition from dharma to law, but as a transition from law to dharma.

This article focuses on the representations and perceptions of Muslim Palestinian women as encapsulated by early Israeli legislation. The analysis is based on a close reading of the negotiations and discussions leading up to the criminalization of bigamy by the Israeli state and, in particular, those principal discussions surrounding the legislation of the Women's Equal Rights Law of 1951. Primary materials from the Israeli State Archives are used to reconstruct the debates in the Knesset, assess the legislation's intended effects on the Muslim Palestinian family, and trace the opposition to it fielded by the Palestinian religious leadership. The legislative process is dissected to expose the implicit and explicit patriarchal and nationalized underpinnings of the image of the “ideal family” fashioned by Israeli legislators. Despite their national divide, I argue, both the Israeli Knesset and the Muslim community leadership articulated women's roles in similarly distinctive national-patriarchal hues.

Filiation among Muslims in India is governed by Muslim personal law, a largely uncodified corpus of key Islamic legal treatises that has subsequently been interpreted and applied through the Common Law frame of British colonial courts and the post-Independence Indian judicial system by virtue of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937. Muslim personal law recognizes only legitimate filiation resulting from a valid or irregular marriage, barring illegitimate children from maintenance and intestate succession and prohibiting adoption. However, a number of legislative enactments have modified key aspects of the law of filiation among Muslims: shifting the presumption of legitimacy arising from a valid marriage to the time of the wedding, rather than the time of conception; invalidating the doctrine of dormant fetus; and lifting certain disabilities incurred from illegitimacy. Further, although adoption based on customary law is somewhat common in India and has been recognized by courts, its effect among Muslims has tended only to lift the bar to paternal succession and seldom creates filiation with the adoptive family. Notwithstanding, following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments, an optional secular legal framework for adoption is now available to Muslim prospective parents. The procedure set forth by the Act is nonetheless unwieldly and implementation faces the very practical difficulties of the state in managing and protecting the vast number of destitute and abandoned children in India, for the most part with an unknown filiation.

This article examines the cases of children born out of wedlock and adopted children with the aim of depicting the mechanisms through which the concepts of biological fatherhood, derived from the human-rights framework, and adoption, derived from the customary law framework, have been adopted into Indonesian Islamic family law. We argue that the introduction of external concepts into family law pertaining to Muslims requires an adaptation process in which the relation between these external concepts and core Islamic family law concepts is determined. In the case of children born out of wedlock, this adaptation to core Islamic norms means that biological fatherhood does not lead to a full legal father-child relationship, despite a 2012 Constitutional Court ruling establishing that children born out of wedlock have a civil relationship with their biological father. In the case of adoption, it means that there is no full adoption, despite recognition of customary adoptions under Indonesian law. We argue that in a context of strong support for a religion-based family law, reforms tend to take the form of conditions or exceptions to core religious concepts, as replacing these concepts altogether would be perceived as jeopardizing the religious character of the law. While attempts to replace core Islamic family law concepts will inevitably meet strong resistance, there is much more tolerance for introducing family law reforms that aim at changing the way that Islamic concepts are applied in practice.

This socio-legal narrative investigates the journey from “biological” to “societal” filiation undertaken by Islamic and international law regimes in their endeavors to ensure a child's right to name and identity. Combining a discussion of filiation—a status-assigning process—with adoption and kafāla (fostering) as status-transferring mechanisms, it highlights a nuanced hierarchy relating to these processes within Muslim communities and Muslim state practices. It questions whether evolving conceptions of a child's rights to name and identity represent a paradigm shift from “no status” if born out of wedlock toward “full status” offered through national and international law and Muslim state and community practices. The article challenges the dominant (formal, legal) position within the Islamic legal traditions that nasab (filiation) is obtainable through marriage alone. Highlighting inherent plurality within the Islamic legal traditions, it demonstrates how Muslim state practice and actual practices of Muslim communities on the subject are neither uniform nor necessarily in accordance with stated doctrinal positions of the juristic schools to which they subscribe. Simultaneously, the paper challenges some exaggerated gaps between “Islamic” and “Western” conceptions of children's rights, arguing that child-centric resources in Islamic law tend to be suppressed by a “universalist” Western human-rights discourse. Tracing common threads through discourses within both legal traditions aimed at ensuring children a name and identity, it demonstrates that the rights values in the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child resonate with preexisting values within the Islamic legal traditions.

The article comparatively maps state involvement in the establishment of filiation and the placement of destitute children into new families. It first reports findings from an expert survey that investigates four key areas of state involvement—the legal framework, the role of courts and ministries, guardianship regulations, and financial support and services for destitute children—across fourteen jurisdictions, twelve Muslim-majority countries, and two Muslim-minority countries. Overall, the placement of children into new families remains a sensitive issue because it is linked to different communities “claiming” the child. In principle, the states surveyed do not allow the creation of new families across religious lines. Using Jordan as a case study, the article then focuses on the implications of one particular survey finding: non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries sometimes cannot have children placed into their homes. This finding is based on qualitative data collected in Jordan on adoption (tabannī) in the Greek Catholic community. The article argues that in settings of legal pluralism, state involvement affects different religious communities in different ways. In Jordan, due to structural factors, the state shapes Islamic family law differently than the family laws applied by Christian communities. This leads to the unequal development of different bodies of religious law and thereby to the unequal treatment of Muslim and Christian citizens.