Personal Law and Human Rights in India and Israel

Abstract

Although India and Israel differ dramatically in size, population, and affluence, there are many important similarities. Each is the contemporary vehicle of an old and resilient civilization that expresses a distinctive, influential and enduring arrangement of the various facets of human experience. Each of these cultures underwent a prolonged colonial experience in which its traditions were disrupted and subordinated to a hegemonic European Christian culture; each had an earlier experience with victorious, expansive Islam; each has reached an uneasy but flourishing accommodation with the secular, scientific modernity of the West.In each case this was achieved by a movement that embraced “Enlightenment” values and in turn provoked a recoil from modernity/rediscovery of tradition. In each there is a conflict between those with “modern” secular views of civil society and those revivalists or fundamentalists who seek to restore an indigenous religiously based society. The secular nationalism that predominated in the struggle for independence and the formation of the state is now countered by powerful tides of fundamentalism.