Islamic Law in the News Roundup

  • Details of France’s proposed bill to counter what President Macron called “Islamic separatism” began to emerge: the bill seeks to criminalize disclosing data about a person’s location to those who might do harm, to provide for summary trials for perpetrators of online hate crimes, to empower judges to prevent individuals with a certain criminal history from entering places of worship, and to require associations wishing to claim public funding to abide by and respect “the values of the republic.”
  • Iran’s Ayatollah Abul Qassem Alidoust called on Pope Francis to denounce what he considers to be derogatory depictions of the Prophet and French President Macron who expressed his support for these publications.
  • With an overwhelming majority of American Muslims voting for President-elect Biden, Mohammad H. Fadel recently argued that support for Trump among Muslims, apart from stemming from a variety of reasons including internalized Islamophobia, was contrary to established principles of Islamic law and ethics that includes, among others, the duty to elect the most qualified candidate to any public office.
  • Morocco’s Minister of Islamic Affairs, Ahmed Toufiq, announced that the country would soon resume its imām training program with necessary precautions against COVID in place.
  • Speaking at a virtual meeting convened by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Muslim nations to work together to ease currency pressure, suggesting the use of local currencies for trade.
  • Malcolm Omirhobo, a human rights lawyer in Nigeria, argued that the Arabic script appearing on some of the banknotes issued by the country’s central bank violates the Nigerian Constitution’s commitment to secularism.

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