- In “From Militant Democracy to a Rights-Based Paradigm: The Evolution of the Turkish Constitutional Court’s Interpretation of Secularism” (Law and Governance: South East Europe), Batuhan Ustabulut (University of Antwerp) observes that “after the establishment of the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) which was founded by the Constitution of 1961, it has been observed that the TCC has followed an ideologically based assertive secular approach for more than almost 50 years. This approach of the TCC has caused religion-state relations to become one of the most important debates in Turkish public law. After the constitutional amendment of 2010 regarding the acceptance of individual applications, there has been a change in the TCC’s approach to freedom of religion toward passive secularism.”
- In “What Make Muslim Ecologies?: Sacred Geographies and the Vernacular Life of Islam in India” (The India Forum), Mukul Sharma (Ashoka University) observes that “Field studies of Muslim communities in Kargil [India] describe how the cutting of juniper— a slow-growing tree that is ecologically critical for soil stability and fuel in this fragile environment—is restricted through community norms. Participants explicitly describe these norms in the vocabulary of Islamic stewardship: the idea that resources are held in trust and that wasteful or excessive use is a kind of wrongdoing for which one is accountable. Water in Kargil is distributed through collective irrigation arrangements that draw on a specific principle of Islamic law , that flowing water (as distinct from water that has been collected or stored) cannot be privately owned and access to it is a shared right that no individual can foreclose.”
- In “Between Consultation and Command: The Quran, Islamic Law, and Warrior Hermeneutics” (JURISTNews), AmirAli Maleki (Praxis Publication) writes that “in Iranian legal doctrine, mahdūr al-dam does not exist as an autonomous provision in the Civil or Penal Code; it survives as a jurisprudential threshold concept rooted in Shi’[ī] legal tradition and enters positive law only indirectly through the structure of qiṣāṣ (retributive justice) in the Islamic Penal Code, where its relevance is strictly judicial and interpretive. It can only be determined by a competent court through due process and only under exceptional conditions in which the legal status of protection itself is contested. Outside this horizon, any unilateral claim of mahdūr al-dam collapses into illegality, and any act based on such self-authorization remains homicide under Iranian criminal law.”