This paper addresses and critiques the case for state-level legislative bans on courts citing “Islamic law” or the law of Muslim-majority countries. In particular, the paper reviews the most substantive evidence adduced by the bans’ supporters, in the form of a set of state court cases published by the Center for Security Policy (CSP). Very few of these cases, in fact, show courts actually applying Islamic or foreign law, and in none of these cases would the various forms of proposed legislation have been likely to alter the result. Thus even this report does not suggest a need for the state laws purporting to ban sharīʿa. The paper thus argues that even if these bans are not unconstitutionally discriminatory in their effect, they are ineffective at achieving their claimed purpose.
Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushanī recorded the following case as a ḥikāya, an anonymous report: A Christian appeared before the judge Aslam b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, petitioning to be executed. The anecdote offers insight into the historical role of judges during a period of religious dissent in the Umayyad Caliphate, while the author's narrative voice demonstrates past judicial approaches to rationality, humor, and violent penalization.
This text is part of Maribel Fierro, The Judges of al-Andalus, forthcoming.
Resolution 100/2/10 on Human Cloning (“Resolution”) cites primarily to the Qur’an, only once cites to hadith, and otherwise relies heavily upon uncited scientific definitions and experiments. The Resolution begins with a two-page preamble, providing an overview of Qur’anic excerpts that describe the purity of God’s creation of man and proscribe manipulations and interventions in God’s creation. The Resolution then defines ‘cloning’ as either cloning by division or nuclear transfer—both of which depend upon an intervention in the divine process of creation. Finally, the Resolution concludes that “[i]t is prohibited to clone human being[s], such as in the above-mentioned two cases or by any other method that results in the multiplication of human specie[s].”