Tainted Liberalism: Israel's Palestinian-Arab Millets

On the genealogy and legitimacy of the secular state: Böckenförde and the Asadians

“…Others have made critical assessments of the religious (and ethnic) status‐based personal law systems and religious legal pluralism more generally, which exist in postcolonial polities throughout the Middle East and Africa (Charrad, ; Mamdani, ; Sezgin, ). But Mahmood (, p. 124) makes the additional claim that this logic is internal to the ideology of the nation‐state itself insofar as any minority identity “by virtue of its religious, cultural or ethnic difference from the majoritarian culture, represents a departure from majoritarian norms.” She finds the same logic at work in political liberalism because it, too, installs a public‐private division between the personal and the political (Mahmood, , p. 135; see Karayanni, ) . The creation of a secular civil code of personal law and fragmented religious status‐based systems of legal pluralism, allegedly institute the same division between public and private, facilitating the modern state's prerogative to regulate domestic and sexual relations and to construct the private sphere (Mahmood, , p. 135) .…”

“…It is thus utterly misleading to portray the public/private distinction at work in the system of religious status group legal pluralism in states that privilege majority religions as being congruent with liberal principles (Karayanni, 2016).…”

“…It is thus utterly misleading to portray the public/private distinction at work in the system of religious status group legal pluralism in states that privilege majority religions as being congruent with liberal principles (Karayanni, ). It is also disingenuous to elide the distinction between liberal and illiberal conceptions of public and private: there is a great difference between the protection of personal liberty and freedom of intimate association under liberal egalitarian systems of civil law and the lack of decisional autonomy and equality for individuals locked into religious status systems of governance permitted by the state.…”

A global and historical exploration: Legislative reform in Muslim family laws in Muslim‐majority versus Muslim‐minority countries

“…They recognized religious communities as distinct millets and allowed them to administer religious family laws at communal courts. Millet ‐like pluri‐legal systems have long been considered detrimental to human and women's rights (Karayanni, 2016; Sezgin, 2010). Perhaps this is why we observe an inverse relationship between religious diversity and substantive reforms (often initiated to enhance women's status) in Muslim‐majority countries 33…”