While many have implemented best practices intended to help stem the spread of COVID-19, there are also a substantial number of citizens, both domestically and abroad, who have resisted these practices. We argue that public health authorities, as well as scientific researchers and funders, should help address this resistance by putting greater effort into ascertaining how existing religious practices and beliefs align with COVID-19 guidelines. In particular, we contend that Euro-American scholars—who have often tended to implicitly favor secular and Christian worldviews—should put added focus on how Islamic commitments may (or may not) support COVID-19 best practices, including practices that extend beyond the domain of support for mental health.
Political liberals claim that liberal polities may legitimately dismiss the objections of ‘unreasonable’ citizens who resist political liberals’ favored principles of justice and political justification. A growing number of other political philosophers, including post-colonialist theorists, have objected to the resulting insularity of political liberalism. However, political liberals’ insularity also often presents them from being sensitive or responsive to these critics’ complaints. In this article, I develop a more efficacious internal critique of political liberalism: I show that political liberals’ own core principles of liberal legitimacy sometimes require liberal polities to engage with the objections of those who hold ‘unreasonable’, and even illiberal, views. First, I draw on the work of Sayyid Qutb, an illiberal Islamic political thinker, to argue that – contrary to what political liberals often imply – even ‘unreasonable’, illiberal citizens may be fair-minded: that is, they may be actively concerned to cooperate with others on fair and mutually endorsable terms. Second, I contend that a liberal state’s own core commitment to treating citizens as free and equal requires it to offer fair-minded illiberal citizens like Qutb deep reasons – that don’t presuppose agreement on liberal principles of justice and so can speak to them in the dialectical position they start from – for why they should accept the liberal laws with which the state coerces them to comply. By showing how political liberals’ own commitments oblige them to address even ‘unreasonable’ political perspectives, I open the door to their more robust engagement with their critics, including not only comparative political theorists but also the growing number of illiberal citizens who challenge democratic regimes.
This essay compares patterns in Ḥanafī and Mālikī rulings about marital annulments and shows how they are connected to differences in how these two schools treated the relationships between marriage, sales, and worship law. Drawing on a variety of jurisprudential texts from the 5th/11th to the 9th/15th centuries, including Ibn Rushd’s (d. 595/1198) Bidāyat al-Mujtahid and Burhān al-Dīn al-Farghānī al-Marghīnānī’s (d. 593/1197) al-Hidāyah, we first show that Ḥanafī and Mālikī rulings on annulments were consistently inconsistent: when they differed, Mālikīs consistently ruled to permit annulments that Ḥanafīs prohibited. Focusing then on annulments based on defects in dower and maintenance, we show how Mālikī rulings manifest a comparatively stronger emphasis on the analogy between marriage and sale, while Ḥanafī rulings manifest a comparatively stronger emphasis on the analogy between marriage and worship. Finally, we discuss how these differences in emphases may help explain the schools’ other divergent rulings on annulments.
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