In “Polymorphous Discrimination: Rohingya Women in the Goggles of Intersectionality,”Islamic Law and the Muslim World eJournal, Shadrack Bentil and Edmund Poku Adu analyze the plight of Rohingya women in the Rakhine State in Myanmar using intersectionality theory, in order to identify the grounds on which Rohingya women are methodically discriminated. The paper reveals multi-faceted structural discrimination embedded in the social and cultural structures; religion and ethnicity (sexual violence); and legal, political and economic structures.
M. Mohsin Alam Bhat approaches Indian secularism from the perspective of social stratification, by focusing on the intersecting institutional debates on affirmative action for Muslims in India in “Equality in Secularism: Contemporary Debates on Social Stratification and the Indian Constitution,”Islamic Law and the Muslim World eJournal (originally published in Regulating Religion in Asia: Norms, Modes, and Challenges).
In “Scholars, Spice Traders, and Sultans: Arguing over the Alms-Tax in the Mamluk Era,”Islamic Law and Society,Joel Blecher argues that it was precisely the Mamluk-era jurists’ careful defense of exemptions and exclusions that allowed them to define the essence of zakāt against forms of taxation they considered unlawful. By narrowing the scope of zakāt, jurists attempted to achieve a moral aim that went beyond the ritual purification of wealth: a limit on the sultanate’s otherwise arbitrary power to tax Muslims as it wished. In doing so, they alleviated some of the tax burden for spice merchants and camel herders alike.
