- Jalal al-Qassab, Redha Rajab and Mohammed Rajab, three members of the progressive Bahraini think tank Al-Tajdeed, were sentenced to a year in jail and a fine for “ridiculing” Islam. The sentence is suspended, pending an appeal. For more content and context on harsh interpretations and applications of Islamic criminal law, consult our Editor-in-Chief, Professor Intisar Rabb’s “Resource Roundup: Islamic Criminal Law.” For more news blurbs relating to harsh applications of Islamic criminal law, consult our “Islamic Criminal Law in the News Roundup.”
- “In a radical break with Islamic orthodoxy, Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, or Revival of Islamic Scholars” has called for “abolishing the concept of a caliphate in Islamic law.”
- Women in Kerala, India protested and demanded reforms to the Islamic inheritance law applicable to them.
- Observers have reported that Iranian authorities, in an attempt to induce compliance with the country’s mandatory ḥijāb laws, are contemplating new ways to sanction women who do not comply with the law such as “denying unveiled women service at airports and restaurants, educational services, blocking phone lines and using surveillance cameras.”
- It is reported that around 4,300 women from India will travel to Mecca to perform the Islamic pilgrimage, without being accompanied by a male relative, which some observers have described as “a shift in attitudes toward women’s participation in religious events.”
- The Islamic Fatwā Council in Iraq, “a non-government body of [Shī’ī and Sunnī] clerics headquartered in the Iraqi spiritual capital of Najaf,” issued a fatwā against Hamas, accusing it of being “un-Islamic.”