Choosing Faith, Inheriting Religion: Personal Status Law in Israel and the Identity Struggle of Arabic-Speaking Evangelicals

This chapter explores and compares the dilemmas and hesitations colonial authorities in nineteenth-century island Southeast Asia (present-day Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia) faced while implementing abolitionist principles. For most of the nineteenth century, Spanish, Dutch, and British colonial authorities in Southeast Asia confined their abolitionist policies to outlawing human trafficking. They staged major maritime operations to suppress the widespread slave raiding by pirates. This struggle against human trafficking and kidnapping guided British and Dutch colonial authorities in their design of indentured migration contracts to ensure that migrant workers from China, India, and the region itself came to plantations and mines with their consent. That these contracts legitimized coerced labour relations was taken for granted. Regarding forms of slavery and bondage that were not the direct result of kidnapping, the colonial governments in island Southeast Asia were even more condoning. They were inclined to consider indigenous forms of slavery as mild, underrating its obvious economic importance and its role in state-building in the region. They were equally reluctant to outlaw systems of bondage that the emerging plantation conglomerates in island Southeast Asia relied on. This chapter submits that precisely because of the pivotal economic and political importance of human bondage in the region, the Dutch, Spanish, and British authorities did not address this issue with a straightforward agenda.

This chapter looks at the implementation of personal status laws in independent Bangladesh. The shifting demography includes four major religious communities - Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian - living in Bangladesh, which follow their religion-based personal status laws. Following independence from Pakistan in 1971, Bangladesh enacted a secular Constitution in 1972, in which equality and equal protection of all citizens, protection against discrimination on religious grounds, and freedom to profess, propagate, and practise religion are guaranteed. Relatedly, application of religious personal status law in the court is mandated subsequently through adopting different legislation passed during the British rule in India, and by the Constitution. In Bangladesh, personal status laws cases are adjudicated by the Family Court - a special civil court accessible to people from all religious communities, with an appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. This chapter suggests that the judicial implementation of personal status laws has failed to secure equal treatment and protection of members of different religious communities (particularly of women) and, thereby, has contributed to violating the equality principle of the Constitution.

Palestinians fall under a dizzying array of laws and courts, which adjudicate their personal status matters. The specific court or law that applies depends both on the religious/communal identity of the person and the area in which the person lives. Those who are residing in the State of Israel as it existed before 1967 are governed by Israeli laws. The Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have also been under Israeli law since the 1967 Occupation. This chapter concerns the personal status law for those Palestinians who are living in the two other main areas – the West Bank and Gaza. Those living in the West Bank are governed by Jordanian Personal Status Law. Those in Gaza are governed by the Egyptian Law on Family Rights. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the respective family laws will be unified in the near future given political and legislative paralysis in Palestine.

The chapter explains that Israel’s personal status regime, a system of state-sanctioned religious courts for different communities, originated from the Ottoman millet system. It argues that this framework creates an illiberal system where individuals are bound by their religious identity without the option for civil norms. The chapter aims to provide a historical background and a detailed review of the four main religious court systems - Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze - highlighting their unique characteristics and relationships with the state. The concluding section offers an integrative analysis of the system as a “plurality of legal pluralisms,” shaped by power dynamics and diverse political and social discourses.

With a focus on Pakistan’s system of personal status laws, “The Situation in the Country” explores the colonial origins of the legal fusion of religious affiliation and applicable rules of family law. The legal system of British India had recognised civil marriage since 1872 but had made this option conditional on both parties to the marriage renouncing their religion. A 1923 amendment to the Special Marriage Act, 1872 allowed Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists - but not Muslims, Parsis, or Christians - to enter into a civil marriage without having to self-excommunicate. Post-independence, Pakistan continues to administer this colonial legacy of personal status laws, albeit that the legal system privileges Islam and Muslim personal law. This means that in case of a conflict between Muslim personal law and another personal status law, the former will prevail. Recent developments in Pakistan’s personal status laws have seen the enactment of marriage laws for Hindus in 2016 and 2017 and a reform of Christian divorce law as a result of a decision of the Lahore High Court in 2017. The chapter concludes with the observation that being marked by fragmentation and inequality, demands for any reform of Pakistan’s family law remain focused on particular bodies of personal law rather than a reform of the system of personal status laws itself.

The question of how to manage diverse religious communities within a single political community for social peace is a recurring one. If one accepts that religious differences are permanent features of societies, and could not and should not be eliminated by force (expulsion or genocide) or overcome by coercion (forced conversion), formulating systems of governance to manage different religious communities within the nation-state becomes imperative. Historically, several systems of religious governance of multicultural polities have been practiced. The Ottoman millet system is one such system, whereby recognized religious communities were granted jurisdictional autonomy over a limited area of personal law. The millet system is still practiced in some form in certain former Ottoman territories. In contrast, within the Anglo-European context, secular governance (either in emphasizing separation or in emphasizing even-handedness among different religious groups) became the dominant approach to address religious difference. Secular governance posits that peaceful coexistence could be established if states develop a unified form of political authority that was differentiated and furthermore neutral as among rival religious communities. In this chapter, I argue that the primary organizing factor in the state’s structure of governance of religious communities is whether they are regarded as private or public subjects of regulation. The consideration of whether religious communities are conceptualized as private actors or public actors is integral for the purposes of organizing structural approaches to the regulation of religious communities in multicultural polities. This itself reflects whether the state conceptualizes society as being a community of individuals or of ‘nations’. Where religious communities are private actors, they are treated like associations and their members interact with the state primarily as individuals. Where religious communities are treated as public actors, the communal aspect of those communities tends to be emphasized, often over the individual interests within the community. Consequently, the primary regulatory approach towards private religion tends to be one of self-regulation, in addition to general statutory regulation. In comparison, where religious communities are treated as public actors, the state relies on a broader range of regulatory approaches, namely religion-specific statutory regulation, co-regulation, in addition to self-regulation. This article therefore examines the particular challenge of multicultural polities, introduces the modes and dimensions of regulation, dominant approaches to regulating religious communities as public or private subjects, and lastly, the ideological postures that determines the regulatory reach of the state.

This thesis seeks to examine and explain changes in the triangular relationship between Christian missionaries, an Indian princely state and the British colonial authorities. It argues that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the missionaries and the self-declared Hindu state of Travancore maintained a largely favourable relationship despite the clear differences in their respective religious positions. For its vigorous efforts towards 'modernization', Travancore needed the educational and medical activities of the missionaries. At the same time, the Madras government demanded the abolition of caste disabilities and supported similar demands from the missionaries. However, the situation changed significantly with the emergence of Hindu revivalism and communal movements in the late nineteenth century. The state as well as the higher castes became alarmed at the conversion of large number of the lower castes to Christianity. The British authorities, faced with the rise of Indian nationalism, became much more sensitive to religious feelings in Travancore and sought to avoid intervening in social and religious matters as far as possible, though, by contrast, intervention in Cochin remained, for various reasons, more active. In this way, the missionaries practically lost support from the British government. Instead, they were obliged to pay more attention to the Maharaja and his government, which adopted various anti-missionary policies in the 1890s and 1900s. Nevertheless, the Travancore government still needed missionary educational and medical activities as well as their strong influence over the low-caste Christians who became increasingly assertive. But in the 1930s, their relationship became strained once more. The missionaries, who could not expect any substantial help from the British authorities, had almost no choice but to accept the situation. In this way, the Travancore state, while utilizing missionary activities, largely succeeded in preventing Christian influence from expanding further.

Administration of Islamic law in colonial Zanzibar should be seen within the context of the cordial relationship between the sultans and the British colonial authorities. Mutual interests were negotiated between the two imperial powers. Britain needed the sultans to secure British economic interests, whereas the sultans appealed for British protection over the Omani–Zanzibar Sultanate. When Britain established a protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890, they accommodated kadhis and their courts in the colonial establishment through the indirect rule policy. After gaining control over the Zanzibar Sultanate, the British colonial authorities embarked on a process of transforming the kadhi courts. The ultimate objective of the transformation process was to incorporate the courts into the colonial enterprise and gradually reform them. The reform process was marked with transformative contradictions that seemed to be a hallmark of British colonial policy in their territories. The British colonial authorities in Zanzibar embarked on a series of reforms towards transforming the mode of operation of the kadhi courts. Within a span of seven decades of their colonial rule, the British colonial enterprise managed to incorporate the kadhi courts in the colonial judicial system and transform their mode of operation.

Personal status law in Israel: disputes between religious and secular courts IMENGALLALA-ARNDT

British involvement in Muslim affairs in the Straits Settlements (Malacca, Penang and Singapore) was done at the behest of Muslim subjects in the colony. Arab Muslims, who were a minority in the region, exhorted British authorities to take charge of the administration of Muslim marriages and divorces. In this way, authority was vested by these Muslims in colonial legal institutions. Instead of trying to wrest religious authority from the secular colonial power, petitioners essentially attempted to remove religious authority from the hands of Muslim qāḍis by granting more control to non‐Muslim British colonial authorities. Though British authorities were initially reluctant to take on the mantle of administering legal lives of Muslim subjects who formed fifteen percent of the British Crown Colony, a petition in 1875 subsequently led to the application of legal codes and case law devised in British India in 1880 through the Mahomedan Marriage Ordinance that was brought into effect in 1882. This led to an unprecedented development in the administration of Islamic law in Southeast Asia. Thereafter, colonial legal practitioners relied heavily on this corpus of precedents and knowledge prepared by their predecessors in British India. Their conception of Islamic law was in other words based on a universal view of Islamic law, minimally affected by local understandings and customs. A universal view of Islam, coupled with centralized colonial bureaucracy suited the needs of highly mobile Arabs who traversed the Indian Ocean as they craved accountability on the part of legal administrators.

During the second half of the 1930s, as Anglo-Japanese relations gradually deteriorated particularly after the outbreak of the war in Europe British colonial authorities became increasingly concerned about the activities of Japanese citizens resident in the South-east Asian territories. These activities, generally subsumed by the British authorities under the heading of 'espionage', have yet to receive the detailed examination recently devoted by scholars to the broader dimensions of the security of Malaya, and the Singapore naval base in particular. The Japanese population in the Malayan peninsula (administratively divided under the British into the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States and the Straits Settlements) had risen from a single individual in 1871 to over one thousand in the early twentieth century and to over six thousand by the 1930s. Japanese economic interests, though initially focused on the rubber estates, during the inter-war period came increasingly to be concentrated on mining, particularly iron-mining, thereby providing Japan with an increasingly valuable source of raw materials. The impression derived from memoirs by British expatriates and Malayans is of an energetic Japanese community in the inter-war period, engaged in a variety of trades, but mainly as fishermen, barbers, photographers and small shop-keepers, so that 'in almost every town or village of any consequence throughout Malaya there were one or two Japanese shops'. Consequently, the ubiquitous Japanese became the source of 'spy fever', as rumours circulated through the peninsula. The British colonial authorities, over-sensitive to possible diplomatic repercussions from action against nationals of a country still, nominally at least, friendly, obtained sufficient information to substantiate some of the suspicions of Japanese espionage, but generally preferred quietly to deport suspected agents. Nevertheless, occasionally cases did

The State of Israel determined by legislation that matters of personal status including marriage and divorce are subject to personal law, namely religious law. Since the applicable law is personal and not territorial, it varies from person to person and is not uniform as under civil law. This simply means that Israel has no separation of religion and state in matters of divorce and marriage. Religion is the only determining factor in these matters. Thus, marriages prohibited by religious law do not take place in Israel. This is true of all four major religions in Israel: Christianity, Islam, the Druze religion, and Judaism. The discussion under Israeli law should have ended here with regard to civil marriage performed in a foreign country, especially marriage prohibited by Jewish law such as marriage between spouses only one of whom is Jewish, or marriage of a same-sex couple. Prohibited marriage has no place in a state in which religious law prevails in matters of status. However, the Israeli courts, unlike the legislature, have more of a civil orientation than a religious one. They look for ways to bridge the gap between religious law and the rules of private international law that seek to recognize or respect civil legal actions carried out in a foreign country. In some cases, the courts have recognized the status of civil marriages even where such marriages are prohibited by state law. In order to avoid the serious conflict between religious law and the domestic rules of private international law, the court has explained that this is not a matter of personal status but rather an administrative question which purely concerns the Population Registry. For example, same-sex couples can today be registered as married couples in the Population Registry if they were married in a civil ceremony in a foreign country. The decisions made in these matters are greatly disputed and reflect the constant prevailing tensions regarding Israel not only as a Jewish state (characterized by religious law), but also as a democratic state (characterized, among other factors, by recognition of the rules of private international law). Although the Basic Laws stipulate that Israel is both, in practice these values conflict and often collide. This tension is clearly reflected in, and may be analyzed through, the issue of civil marriages performed in a foreign country and prohibited by religious law in Israel.

In 1948, the British colonial authorities promulgated the Emergency Ordinance, banning Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) activities and arresting its members, forcing the CPM to launch its armed struggle earlier than expected. Under British colonial authorities’ formidable encirclement strategy, the CPM gradually retreated to southern Thailand in 1950 to set up new bases. The CPM in its retreat began to scale down military force and personnel. With the evolvement of international affairs in mid 1950s, the CPM further suspended its military activities. In the early 1960s, the issue of the Malaysia Project and the change of international circumstances prompted the CPM to declare the New Directive in which it redefined its direction of struggle and persisted in the path of armed struggle. While the New Directive enabled CPM to gradually revitalize its military strength, Malaysia's internal political conflicts were also worsening, which allowed the CPM to take further action. In 1963, in preparation for its southward advance, the CPM identified clearly “neo-colonialism” and its agent, the “Malaysian” regime, as its new targets of struggle. In mid 1960s, the Struggle against the Counter-revolution incidents broke out within CPM, triggering a political and military crisis in the party, which split into three factions. When the first Struggle against Counterrevolution ended, the CPM issued “Raise High the Great Red Flag and March on with Courage” on 1 June 1968, an important statement announcing officially its readiness to send troops southward. It took the CPM seven years (1961–1968) to adjust and prepare itself before officially launching its assault teams southward on 29 March 1968, which marked a new milestone in CPM's historical development. This article is of the view that the CPM's southward advance strategy is significant and impactful for the CPM in three aspects: (1) it extended the history of the CPM's armed struggle; (2) it provided the CPM's armed struggle with momentum; and (3) it reinforced the authoritarian regime in Malaysia.

Bloody blight plague is an infectious disease of animals that have been occurring in Malaysia for a long time, since the British colonial era. According to the earliest found bloody blight disease has occurred since 1917. The outbreak of bloody blight has brought various implications for the economic and social sectors in Malaya. Therefore, this objective was to study the efforts taken by the British colonial authorities in order to curb the spread of dengue blight that occurs in Malaya from 1917 until 1957. This study applies the method of qualitative research methodology through the analysis and study of reference to primary sources such as documents from the Colonial Secretary's Office, State Veterinary Surgeon, and Annual Reports obtained from National Archive of Malaysiasources. Therefore, this study was conducted to examinate the British efforts in eradicating this disease. Further, this research has also led to the conclusion and finding that the British colonial authorities had arried out their roles and responsibilities well despite having to face some constraints in addressing the epidemic, especially when tried to develop a vaccine centre in Malaya in 1953.

Lebanese Women at the Crossroads: Caught between Sect and Nation