Religious Legitimacy Research Articles

Representing Muhammad: The Prophet on Screen

Muhammad: The Messenger of God (Majid Majidi 2015) is a major contribution to the discourses on and representations of the Prophet. Endorsed by Iran’s highest political authority, the supreme leader, the project’s ambitions far exceed the film’s limit, the multiple significances of which are examined here. The mammoth undertaking in the construction of the movie set, the Cinematic City of Nur, is an assertion of religious legitimacy as well as superiority in the preservation of Muslim sacred sites, history, and heritage. The film attempts to rectify the “falsification” of the narratives of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad both in western depictions as well as by Muslim extremists. Majidi employs various approaches in negotiating the three, at times contradictory, demands of the medium’s need for dramatization, the religious desiderata, and the film’s claims to authenticity, which I outline here. Even though set 1400 years ago, the film highlights the relevance of the Prophet’s narrative in a continuum that both precedes and extends beyond his own lifetime. The Prophet is relevant to the past before him as he is presented as the true heir to Judaism and Christianity. His narrative is relevant to the present as the story of his suffering resonates with the challenges that contemporary Iranians face as history repeats itself.

Attitudes of Jewish and Muslim Religious Leaders Towards the Declaration of Principles as a Test Case for Judaism and Islam between Peace and Conflict

The Declaration of Principles (Oslo I Accord, September 1993) was the inaugural groundbreaking agreement in the Israeli‒Palestinian Identity conflict, which revolves around consecrated territory as well as identity components on both sides. This historic accord elicited myriad responses, yet the stances of religious figures are particularly consequential given the profound and intricate religious underpinnings of the conflict. This paper presents the attitudes toward the Declaration of Principles (DOP) held by six religious personages: Rabbi Yehuda Amital, an Israeli Jew supporter of the DOP; Rabbi Shlomo Goren, an Israeli Jew who opposed it; Sheikh Abdullah Nimer Darwish, an Israeli Arab who endorses the DOP; Sheikh Raed Salah, an Israeli Arab who rejects it; Sheikh ʿImad al-Falouji, a Palestinian proponent; and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian opponent. Based on rulings, statements, and press publications, this paper analyzes their rationales and utilization of religion’s social influencing mechanisms, seeking to understand religion’s capacity to confer legitimacy upon alternative religious values enabling conflict resolution through political means, thereby impacting the conflict toward reconciliation or, conversely, escalation. This paper aims to characterize the discourse and reasoning to propose more efficacious means of attaining broad religious legitimacy for future, sustainable peace accords.

Interpreting Visuality in the Middle Ages: The Iconographic Paradigm of the Refectory of the Monastery of San Salvador de Oña

The research area of the interaction between religion, politics, and medieval Hispanic art has been pioneering and at the cutting edge of contemporary historiography in recent years. The deployment of iconographic and calligraphic motifs in medieval religious spaces has been identified as a key means of propagating legitimating messages of power and disseminating Christian doctrines. This interdisciplinary study proposes an analysis of the artistic vestiges present in the refectory of the Monastery of San Salvador de Oña (Burgos), with a view to establishing their decorative evolution during the 14th century and their symbolic significance. In order to establish a chronological proposal for the remains, the historical, artistic, and architectural contexts of the monastery are analyzed. This is complemented by a study of materials and techniques and a symbolic and iconographic analysis of the signs of power and evangelical concepts from the time of Peter I until the transition to the Trastámara dynasty. In this way, a cross-disciplinary investigation is proposed, with the aim of elucidating how a sacred artistic work situated within a secular context can serve multiple purposes of political and religious legitimation through the adaptation of its iconography over time.

Rational choice theory and religion: the case of Turkey

ABSTRACT This study applies the rational choice perspective to government religion policy in Turkey. We argue that a rational choice analysis can provide a new perspective on how the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) transformed Turkey’s religion policy from one that was constitutionally secular to one which strongly supports Islam. We also further develop the rational choice approach arguing that radical transitions in religion policy are often incremental and require support from political allies. Also, while the motivation for transitioning from a secular regime to a religious monopoly may be due to a desire for religious legitimacy, the nature and timing of this transition may be influenced by the rise or decline of other bases for legitimacy. Overall, this study demonstrates the utility of applying the rational choice theory of religion to Muslim-majority countries and the mechanisms through which countries change their religion policies.

<i>Fiqh al-azma:</i> Crisis Management of Theological Discourse in Syria

In the context of the ongoing civil war in Syria, the official Muslim clergy of the country, represented by the Ministry of Waqf Affairs, has developed a number of theological and legal resolutions on the most pressing issues, united by the common names Fiqh al-Azma (“crisis theology”). They pay special attention to the issues of criticism of takfirism, non-denominationalism, nationalism, explaining the meaning of jihād, the prohibition of riots and revolutions, the religious legitimacy of the national state, interreligious and interfaith dialogue and collaboration within one country, the differentiation of the concepts of Islamic politics and political Islam. This study analyzes the sources and methodology of constructing this theological concept, which, according to the developers themselves, is an example of a moderate renewal (tajdīd) of Islamic theological discourse, the main purpose of which is to confront Fiqh al-Fitnah “theology of turmoil” preached by various extremist groups. The paper also examines an example of one of the most original studies — on the principles of citizenship (muwāṭana) according to Islam, which largely incorporates the main features of the entire concept of Syrian crisis theology.

Churches Facing War: Ecumenical Deadlocks and Ecclesiological Challenges

Abstract The war in Ukraine has generated a debate both within the orthodox church and on an inter-Christian level regarding the religious legitimation of military conflicts. The inability of inter-Orthodox and ecumenical bodies to formulate a common stance in the face of war has raised questions about the current methodology employed by ecumenical assemblies. Some have suggested exhausting the instruments of dialogue, while others have proposed expelling churches with a pro-war profile from ecumenical organisations. This article aims to demonstrate how this problem also arises from the politicisation of ecumenical assemblies, which detracts them from the ecclesiological principle that should guide Christian witness.

The Abbasi's View Toward Reign 132-247 A.H./749-861 A.D. A Study for the Policy of the First Abbasid Era Caliphs in Stabilizing the State's Pillars and Legitimacy

This study deals with the religious aspects that the Caliphs of Bani Abbas worked to highlight to the public in an attempt to gain support to stand in the face of the opposition movements, especially the Alawites on the one hand, and in order to gain religious legitimacy for their caliphate in the hearts of the subjects on the other hand. The research dealt with the most prominent policies and methods they followed to achieve their political goals which they molded within a religious character.

Better to Trust in the Lord? Religious Salience, Regime Religiosity, and Interstate Dispute Resolution

Abstract How do religiously salient issues influence the peaceful resolution of interstate territorial disputes? Conflict scholars tend to represent “religious” disputes as uniquely resistant to compromise owing to their supposed symbolic indivisibility and the ideological inflexibility of the actors who pursue them. Rather, we argue that religious regimes’ preferred forums to advance peaceful resolution depend upon interactions between the breadth of a dispute’s religious salience and a claimant regime’s domestic religious legitimacy. Secular regimes lack both religious legitimacy and political motivation to engage. Thus, their dispute resolution forum preferences are unrelated to religious salience. Highly religious regimes command significant religious legitimacy and are therefore empowered to directly negotiate over broadly salient religious issues. Yet their political dependence upon religious constituencies causes them to strictly avoid legally binding conflict management over narrowly salient religious issues. By contrast, moderately religious regimes lack sufficient religious legitimacy to directly negotiate over both broadly and narrowly salient issues, rendering them particularly dispute-resolution avoidant. We test and generally confirm these propositions, utilizing new data measuring the religious salience of interstate territorial disputes in the post-Cold War era.

Deceptive Debauchery: Secret Marriage and the Challenge of Legalism in Muslim-Minority Communities

“Secret Marriage” is a category accommodating a range of arrangements that seek to conceal a marital union, typically from an existing spouse, the family of the bride or groom, a segment of the community, or the state. These contentious unions have seen an upsurge in recent times in Muslim-majority countries, and, more recently, in minority-Muslim communities in the West. This essay examines the phenomenon in minority communities using three interrelated lenses of analysis: the legal, the moral, and the socio-institutional. Taking this multi-faceted approach, in this essay, I first examine the legal doctrines of the four Sunni schools of law on the requirement of publicity and witness testimony in marriage before situating that legal discussion about contractual validity within a comprehensive analysis of the broader moral and religious legitimacy of entering into a secret union. I argue that while jurists stipulate disparate minimums for contractual validity, nearly all secret marriage arrangements are nonetheless considered invalid (fāsid), meaning they are incorrectly conducted by failing to meet the required conditions for the contract to produce its legal effects (ṣiḥḥa) and are also prohibited (ḥarām) in themselves or for their entailments, meaning contracting such a marriage is sinful and entails punishment. As I show, even as some jurists may make arguments that may seem to imply that some versions of secret marriage meet the basic conditions to make them technically valid, these same jurists nonetheless argue that such marriages are immoral, religiously deficient, unbecoming of a Muslim, and little more than a pretext for illicit sex. Apart from the theoretical question of whether a secret marriage meets the conditions of contractual validity, parties to a secret marriage in Muslim communities today further engage in a number of sins and transgressions and cause harms to spouses, children, parents, extended family, and the community that must also be reckoned with. The essay concludes with recommendations for how religious authorities can take steps towards regulating marriage in minority-Muslim communities, highlighting the need for public education on Muslim marriage practices that is embedded in a deeper religious morality centering the Sunna to counteract the dominant legalism in the Muslim community that underlies numerous contemporary dilemmas.

Ideals and Interests in Intellectuals’ Political Deliberations

The academic literature equates the Arab Spring politics of Egypt’s two highest official religious figures – the Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib and Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa—as “anti-revolutionary.” This article argues that al-Tayyib and Gomaa’s politics are fundamentally different. While Gomaa’s politics are submissive to the state, al-Tayyib’s politics are a negotation without confrontation. I explain the former by Gomaa’s struggle for religious authority either by seeking official positions or obstructing the revealing of information harmful to his religious legitimacy. The statist legitimacy threat against Gomaa is central to understanding his politics. Defending al-Azhar, on the other hand, is what explains al-Tayyib’s fluctuating politics. Theoretically, I advocate that explaining intellectuals’ politics requires focusing on their political deliberation. Only with a methodologically rigorous reconstruction of the intellectuals’ political deliberation and its context, can we decide the relative relevance of factors like ideals, interests, and structures (e.g., the state). I establish this with more than a thousand chronologically ordered primary sources and twenty interviews with people in Gomaa and al-Tayyib’s circles.

They Are the Treasure of the Commonwealth: Franciscan Charisma and Merchant Culture in Medieval Barcelona

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been a truism that the emergence of Protestantism was the main cause of the development of capitalism. However, a careful analysis of primary sources, especially in Latin countries, shows a quite different reality. Three centuries before the emergence of Protestantism, the Franciscans generated a discourse that made it possible to begin to legitimize the commercial practices that would later enable the emergence of capitalism. Based on these premises, this article aims to explore the discursive and juridical primary sources of medieval Barcelona—especially the testimonies of the Franciscan intellectual Francesc Eiximenis and merchant wills—to provide relevant new data and interpretations of how Franciscan charisma brought about a better understanding and legitimization of mercantile work. I intend to use the concept of charisma to better understand the great paradox of how those who aspired to a life of extreme poverty—the Franciscans—succeeded in legitimizing the work of those who aspired to a comfortable life, namely, the emerging merchant group. The merchants provided the Franciscans with the material capital necessary for their establishment in the city, while the Franciscans granted the merchants symbolic capital that was indispensable for the development of their mercantile work, social recognition, and religious legitimacy.

Transwomen and transmen from Islamic family law perspective

This article attempts to explain why the issue of sex change is still an important discussion topic in Islam. The phenomenon of transwomen and transmen is judged unilaterally on the basis of religious, cultural, and socio-religious doctrines. This study aims to be able to look further at the research gap from the previous studies by looking at the reception of transwomen and transmen in the view of Islamic family law as well as to discover the factors that have caused gender reassignment among transwomen and transmen. This paper has discovered that transwomen and transmen have suffered a stigma from religion and in society, and this stigma has been influenced by various economic, political, and religious, doctrinal interests. However, at the same time, there are cases that show religious legitimacy allows someone to change their gender. This research has been conducted using the literature study approach to investigate the reception of transwomen and transmen from the perspective of Islamic family law.

Under God, indivisible? Religious salience and interstate territorial conflict

How and under what conditions do religious factors explain the militarization of interstate territorial disputes? We argue that inconclusive findings in previous studies stem from inadequate consideration of the interaction between challenger state religiosity and the domestic constituencies actually invested in religiously salient territorial claims. To address this gap, this article differentiates between secular regimes, which provide minimal support to their state’s dominant religion and religious regimes, which strongly support their dominant religion. It also considers narrowly salient coreligionist populations, which appeal almost exclusively to religious audiences, versus broadly salient contested sacred sites, which appeal to much broader constituencies. We argue that the interaction between these two factors produces very different patterns of interstate conflict behavior. Secular regimes avoid escalation over narrowly salient religious claims because they do not depend upon religious constituents for support. However, they lack the necessary religious legitimacy to manage outbidding challenges that frequently arise over more broadly salient claims. Religious regimes, by contrast, enjoy high domestic religious legitimacy, enabling more peaceful engagement with broadly salient religious claims. Yet their political dependence upon religious constituencies incentivizes conflict when disputes involve narrowly salient religious claims. We test these propositions utilizing original data on the religious salience of interstate territorial disputes in the post-Cold War era, from 1990 to 2010. Analyses, using both dichotomous and continuous measures of regime religiosity, confirm these inferences and contribute to highly nuanced understandings of how state-religion policy and religious salience interact to influence patterns of interstate violence.

Culture, institutions and the long divergence

During the medieval and early modern periods the Middle East lost its economic advantage relative to the West. Recent explanations of this historical phenomenon—called the Long Divergence—focus on these regions’ distinct political economy choices regarding religious legitimacy and limited governance. We study these features in a political economy model of the interactions between rulers, secular and clerical elites, and civil society. The model induces a joint evolution of culture and political institutions converging to one of two distinct stationary states: a religious and a secular regime. We then map qualitatively parameters and initial conditions characterizing the West and the Middle East into the implied model dynamics to show that they are consistent with the Long Divergence as well as with several key stylized political and economic facts. Most notably, this mapping suggests non-monotonic political economy dynamics in both regions, in terms of legitimacy and limited governance, which indeed characterize their history.

The Legitimation of Religion in Profit Seeking: The Role of National Shari‘āh Division of The Indonesian Muslim Council (DSN-MUI)

Religious legitimacy is a potent means of achieving one's objectives, including the pursuit of economic benefits. This is how Islamic financial institutions employ the fatwa of the National Sharia Council (DSN-MUI) in their operations. Nonetheless, this objective is often in conflict with the noblest religious ideals of justice, equality, and humanity. This paper aims to explain how the DSN-MUI fatwa acquires religious legitimacy, as well as the repercussions of granting this legitimacy to the public that utilizes Islamic financial institutions. The collected data consists of the texts of DSN-MUI fatwa from 2000 to 2021 as well as the results of interviews with DSN-MUI practitioners of Islamic economics, and pertinent academicians. The data is then descriptively and critically analyzed. The findings of the study suggest that there are three fatwa issued by the DSN-MUI that legitimize profits gained by Islamic financial institutions. However, this method may violate significant religious norms. This paper also concludes that competition between conventional and Islamic financial institutions is a significant factor in the emergence of this legitimacy.Keywords: The Legitimacy of Religion, Profit-Seeking, and the National Sharia Division of the Indonesia Muslim Council (DSN-MUI).

IMAGES OF JIHAD AND PROBLEMS OF LEGITIMATION OF RELIGIOUS PROTEST AS A FORM OF CLASS CONFLICT AND SOCIAL LIBERATION

Background. The author analyzes the texts of the Dune cycle in contexts of modern historiography, including its universal methods that allow analyzing “oriental” images in literature through the prism of constructing and deconstructing narratives that form the image of Jihad as a form of political, social and religious struggle of oppressed communities and minorities.
 Purpose. The purpose of the article is an “orientalist” reinterpretation of the images of Jihad in the novels belonging to the Dune cycle including the prequel text presented by Dune. Butlerian Jihad and Dune. Paul.
 Materials and methods. The author uses the methodological tools of intellectual history and studies of nationalism, including the concept of the invention of traditions, which allows to analyze the images of Jihad in science fiction as one of the invented traditions of mass US science fiction literature using the texts of the Dune cycle. Orientalism as a method is used to analyze Muslim motifs in the prose of F. Herbert, B. Herbert and K. Anderson, which, as the author of the article presumes, were inspired by political, ideological and religious stimuli. The author states that the orientalist approach can be an effective interpretative model for an interdisciplinary analysis of American science fiction as a cultural landscape for the development of Jihad images in the Western intellectual tradition of the consumer society.
 Results. The ideological and political foundations for the development of images of Jihad as a social concept of American science fiction are studied in the article. The article analyzes the ideological origins, as well as the political prototypes and archetypes of the Muslim radicals of the Dune cycle. The author analyzes the ideological discourse of radical Islamism, presented in American mass culture through the prism of religious war images as attempts to implement the doctrine and social liberation. The article analyzes the attempts of American writers to form a positive and attractive image of a radical political protest under religious Muslim slogans. Therefore, it is shown that American science fiction prose actualized the mobilization potential of Islamism, imagining and inventing it as a form of legitimate social and economic protest of the oppressed masses against discrimination. The author presumes that some American authors revised the images of Jihad, offering its interpretation as a radical social and class protest based on religious legitimation.

Normativity and the Critical Functions of Genealogy: The Case of Modern Science1

AbstractThe first part of this article offers some general remarks about genealogical approaches to history, focusing on historical narratives that stress the role played by theological considerations in the formation of aspects of secular modernity. A central question is whether such genealogies can serve to critique the present without drawing upon contestable moral or religious commitments. I suggest that genealogies fulfil this function when they identify inconsistencies in putatively neutral or secular stances by revealing how their coherence ultimately relies upon unacknowledged theological foundations. Key figures in this initial discussion include Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, and Brad Gregory. The second part of this article sets out a theological genealogy of modern science, offering it as a test case for some of the analytical considerations outlined in the first part. These latter sections are a summary of my own previous arguments about the theological foundations of modern science, considered under the description of theological genealogy. Here I discuss the religious legitimation of modern science, the origins of the idea of laws of nature, and the role played by theological anthropology in the development of experimental methods of inquiry.

Al‐Azhar and the Salafis in Egypt: Contestation of two traditions

<scp>Al‐Azhar</scp> and the Salafis in Egypt: Contestation of two traditions

The King’s Gambit: Rationalizing the fall of the Templars

What can the fall of the Knights Templars teach us about medieval institutions? We highlight that the Templar’s annihilation results from the institutional shock of Pope Clement V’s decision to relocate the papacy from Italy to France. Prior to the relocation, an equilibrium persisted for more than a century where the Templars made loans to more powerful kings, with the reassurance that they were protected by the Church. The decision of Pope Clement V to relocate the papacy to France altered the Church’s relationship with the French Crown and imposed substantial constraints on the Church’s ability to safeguard one of its most important monastic orders, the Knights Templar. In a dynamic game scenario, we model Clement V and Philip IV’s decision making, emphasizing important choices that led to the Knights Templar’s demise. This historical episode illustrates the relationship between credible commitments and religious legitimacy, and the precarious and personal nature of pre-modern political institutions.

Risk, religion, and reified camels: the past and the future of insurance in Iran

This paper is a contribution to the understanding of insurance and risk management as a culturally mediated form of social action. It examines how commercial insurance functions in the Iranian marketplace, focusing on insurance against liability in bodily harm. The quantum of damages (diya) currently used in Iran’s ‘Islamicized’ laws, including in insurance law, is rooted in the historical conventions of Bedouin Arabs, chief among which was the cultural use of camels as a benchmark for the valuation of human life. The imposition of this cultural rule on contemporary insurance contracts complicates risk management via probabilistic logic, because there are major fluctuations in camel valuations in the Iranian market today. The use of this benchmark also has significant socio-economic implications for the insured. But, at the same time, there is surprising synergy between ancient culture and modern business because the same traditions that established camels as the benchmark for diya also gave birth to one of the earliest forms of proto-insurance against liability and continue to give religious legitimacy to the insurance business. By examining the incorporation of the Islamic quantum of damages in insurance calculations, this paper contributes to the broader understanding of the cultural and moral underpinnings of insurance, and sheds light on how the tensions between the cultural and economic elements of risk management are managed.