An Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islam
Mohsen Kadivar
Mohsen Kadivar, a philosopher, theologian, and dissident, is Professor of Philosophy at Tarbiat Modares University in Iran and a Visiting Scholar of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He has published 12 books and over 100 papers in various Iranian journals. Despite 18 months' imprisonment, he continues to campaign for reform of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 
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Boundaries and Right in Islamic Law: Introduction
Talal Asad
Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, has a particular interest in the Middle East and Islam. He is the author of Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003).
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Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgment
Baber Johansen

The jurists of classical Islamic Law defined the interior forum (batin) as a limit to the religious validity of the sentences of Muslim judges (and political authorities), because these have neither access to God's knowledge nor to the individual believer’s conscience and motivations. They can base their decisions solely on exterior appearances (zahir) and can, therefore, neither be sure that their judgments correspond to the facts nor to the intentions and memories of the individuals concerned. This holds especially true for questions of belief and unbelief. From the eighth to the nineteenth century, the norms of Islamic law were the result of learned debates among independent jurists and their schools of law. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was integrated into the codes enacted by the competent institutions of the national states and lost its normative authority in most spheres of the modern state law. It remained dominant only in personal statute law, i.e. the rules concerning marriage and divorce, family and succession. From the early seventies of the twentieth century, opposition against the neglect of religious norms in modern state law was centered on the demand for the “codification of Islamic law” (taqnin al-shari’a). Its leaders were jurists trained in modern law faculties, who wanted to insert the norms of classical Islamic Law into the codes of the national state with which they are familiar. The ethical debates of classical Islamic law, obviously, did not lend themselves easily to such an approach.

The jurists movement for the codification of Islamic law gained in momentum during the eighties when, in a number of states, it succeeded in assuring for the classical apostasy rules a place in the modern criminal codes. In other states, such as Egypt, the highest courts opened the way for apostasy trials. The analysis of one apostasy judgment of the highest Egyptian court shows that the court understands belief and apostasy as objective facts that can be separated from the person who professes or denies them. It is on this question that my lecture focuses. The court effectively claims the role of the highest instance in questions of belief and unbelief. Belief and apostasy thus become depersonalized objective facts without any relation to the intentions of the individuals concerned. The court’s sentence does not refer to the believer’s own interior forum (batin): the concept seems to be irrelevant to the judges. Their definition of apostasy serves to control the ideas that can legitimately be discussed in the public sphere. It denies bold reinterpretations of Islam, but also a number of political persuasions and theories, the right of access to the public space and assigns them the private sphere as their legitimate abode. A new concept of private and public is thus developed in the detailed reasoning by which the court justifies its judgment.

There is, to my understanding, nothing in the religion of Islam that renders such a stance necessary. Other courts, in Egypt, develop other ideas of the principles of Islamic normativity and in other Arab states go so far as to develop a concept of privacy that would forbid the debates discussed in this lecture. It seems important to underline that the use of classical elements in the court’s judgment does not conceal the fact that the ethical criteria of classical Muslim law find little place in this jurisdiction that represents a special version of modern legal positivism.

Baber Johansen is the Directeur detudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where he teaches at the Centre d’etude des normes juridiques. He is co-executive editor of the journal “Islamic Law and Society” (Brill, 1994), and area editor for “Islamic Law in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Legal History”. His publications focus on the history and the present of Islamic Law.
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This shari`a system can be thought of in terms of three levels of legal texts. At the highest level, shari`a doctrine, the jurisprudence of the period, constituted an ideology of the property regime. The doctrine provided models for both the range of substantive undertakings and for court processes, but the relationship of these models to the property relations and to litigation on the ground is a key question. At the lowest level, the routine documents of ongoing, uncontested practice proliferated. These included ordinary sale documents, leases, marriage contracts, endowment instruments, wills and estate inheritance instruments. Between high doctrine and low instruments were the records of shari`a court judgments, records in which the conflicts and contradictions of the property system were expressed, argued and ruled upon. In certain problem areas of the law, the ruling imams's personal doctrinal "choices" were designed to guide court judges in their rulings.

Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology, at Columbia University. 
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The Public and Private in Saudi Arabia: Restrictions on the Powers of Committees for Ordering the Good and Forbidding the Evil
Frank E. Vogel
My paper will explore boundaries and rights, the public and the private, as to the enforcement of religious legal rules in societies self-consciously founded on Islamic law. I employ as my case-study legal and social controversies aroused by the Saudi Hay’at al-amr bi-al-ma`ruf wa-al-nahy `an al-munkar, the government agency charged with “ordering the good and forbidding the evil.” The paper will first lay out some of the laws fixing the powers of the Hay’at, including various statutes (or nizams) issued by the king but, of equal or greater importance, the received medieval fiqh rules governing the muhtasib (the official who undertakes on behalf of the community the execution of the Qur’anic obligation of ordering the good and forbidding the evil). Focus shall be on an issue much debated in the classical law and also a long-time bone of contention in Saudi society, namely the legal limits on the powers of the Hay’at to investigate and punish immoral acts occurring in private. Limits on such powers stem from two sources, both in the law and in social understandings of that law. One source, the more prominent in public debate, concerns revelatory and fiqh and related social norms against spying or prying into people’s behavior and against undue attempts to expose people’s sins. Notably, however, this restriction affects only enforcement. The pervasiveness of laws considered to arise from the relationship of the individual to God still stands. A solitary immoral act performed in privacy can still be a sin and a crime, and punishable if it is somehow legitimately known and proved (such as by a confession). The second source of restrictions is more far-reaching, going beyond issues of investigation and proof. As held by the majority of scholars, the Hay’at may not compel or forbid any actions for which the religious-legal ruling (forbidden, obligatory, etc.) is under classical law a matter of legitimate difference of scholarly opinion; or inversely, the Hay’at may compel or forbid only those actions as to which there is a divine command known to a certainty either from a revealed text or from the consensus of scholars. A commonly noted abuse by the Hay’at in Saudi Arabia has been to attempt to enforce rules lacking requisite certainty, such as requiring veiling of the face. Rules known to a certainty have a pervasive role in Islamic constitutional theory. In principle, such rules must be enforced, regardless of whether they concern matters other societies may consider individual or private, such as changing one’s religion. Rules lacking that high degree of certainty cannot – without separate justification on grounds other than religious text – define sins or crimes or be enforced as general rules by the state. Though seemingly scholastic and philosophical, this restriction is potentially crucial in defining a realm of individual autonomy in religious matters and shaping the boundary between public and private in societies self-consciously founded in Islamic law. It is important to examine to what extent the restriction is reflected in legal and social practice in such societies.

Frank E.Vogel is is the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies and Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. His writings include “Islamic Law and Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia” (Boston: Brill, 2000), and, with Samuel L. Hayes III, “Islamic Law and Finance: Religion, Risk and Return” (Kluwer Law International, 1998).
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The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere
Juan R.I. Cole
The radical Islamist regime of the Taliban affords an extensive view of the logic of Muslim fundamentalism regarding the public and private spheres. I argue that the Taliban de-privatized several life-spheres, "publicizing" religion and the body. The Taliban performed power as public spectacle, employing public executions, amputations and whippings. Religion, too, was to be completely public, as Habermas argues it was in Europe before the 18th century. As soon as they took Kabul, 
the Taliban insisted that all residents had to say their five daily prayers, the men in mosques. Likewise, men were given 
six weeks to grow out their beards to a hand's length and to trim their moustaches in accordance with a literal reading of sayings about the Prophet Muhammad's appearance. The young female memoirist of life in Taliban Kabul, Latifa, reported that her middle class father complied with the new rule, but insisted, "My beard belongs to the Taliban, not to me!" The rendering public of religion made public property of every religious act. His body had a choice, of being conformed to the movements and shaping of religion, or of being tortured because of lack of compliance. This publicization of the believer's body resulted in an alienation from individuals of parts of themselves. Likewise, the gendered character of the public and private spheres, with women being confined to the private, is as visible in Taliban thinking as it is in Hegel. The expansion of the public realm of religion and morality by the Taliban had the effect of shrinking the private sphere and so constraining women further. Girls' schools were shuttered and many war widows were reduced to begging and risking sanctions for being in the street without a male guardian. Posters of Bollywood actresses were forbidden, and Kate Winslet was condemned to death in absentia for portraying a fornicator in The Titanic. It is argued that the goal of perfectly privatizing the female body lay behind these Draconian measures.

Juan R.I. Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current research focuses on the history of al-Qaeda and Egyptian groups, as well as groups in Pakistan and the Taliban. He also has an expertise in Shiite Islam, 
the subject of his most recent book, Sacred Space and Holy War (2002).
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The Invasion of the Private Sphere in Iran
Mehrangiz Kar
The Iranian government is a theocracy—the only one in the world today. The clergy control all three branches of government. The supreme leader or velayat-e-faqu’ih is also a cleric. In such a political system all legislation and policy making are conducted in accordance with the leaders’ interpretation of Islamic law or Shari’a. In this paper I will examine the extent to which these laws and policies allow the government to intrude into the private sphere of life and intervene in the privacy of individual citizens. I will use specific examples to illustrate my point that since citizens have no control over their government and cannot impact the interpretation of Shari’a, their private sphere is always threatened by government action.

Mehrangiz Kar is an Iranian human rights lawyer, writer, and former editor of the now-banned Zan literary review. A noted activist, she has published widely on women's issues in Iran, including The Quest for Identity: The Image of Iranian Women in Prehistory and History (co-edited with Lahiji) and Angel of Justice and Patches of Hell: Women in the Iranian Labor Market (1994). 
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Ethical Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt.
Saba Mahmood
Saba Mahmood received her Ph.D, Anthropology, at Stanford University, 1998, and currently teaches in the History of Religions Program, Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her work explores dynamics of religious practice in post-colonial societies, with a particular focus on Islam. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a book entitled “Pious Transgressions: Embodied Disciplines of the Islamic Revival” (Princeton University Press, 2003). 
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Media in the Islamic World: Introduction [Click for full article]
Kian Tajbakhsh
The three papers in this section explore the media’s role in shaping the public and private spheres in Islamic countries. Each paper approaches the issue from a different angle and each focuses upon somewhat distinct national and cultural contexts or units of analysis. Each paper raises a series of questions, some of which are addressed and some remain unanswered. In this brief introduction I will point to two questions in particular. The first is the question of the tension between the form and the content of the media in influencing the nature and the potentials of media technology as a public sphere. To what extent are these two dimensions marching in different directions in the Islamic world? Here we would want to explore the extent to which the form of the new media, particularly the Internet but also newspapers and satellite television, are pluralistic and decentralized and thus lend themselves to a democratic public sphere of ideas and communication, whereas the major content or use of this space is dominated by individuals and groups with non-democratically oriented ideologies. The second, more general question concerns the extent to which the terms public and private mean the same things in Western democratic and Islamic discourse. Each of the writers necessarily bases his or her analysis on certain assumption about the meaning of these terms, but it is possible to argue that Islamic discourse conceptualizes these terms somewhat differently than the way they are used in Western academic discourse.

Kian Tajbakhsh is Senior Research Fellow in the Milano Graduate School, New School University, New York City and Affiliated Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Tehran University, Iran. From 1994 until 2001, he was Assistant Professor of Urban Policy and Politics at the New School. He has spent the last two years (2000-2002) in Iran conducting research. Dr. Tajbakhsh’s two main research areas (with publications) are: Decentralization Reforms and the Creation of Local Government in Iran: “Political Decentralization and the Creation of Local Government in Iran,” Social Research, vol. 67, no. 2 (Summer 2000), and Urban Social Theory: the role of cities and urbanism in shaping citizenship in cosmopolitan urban societies.The Promise of the City: Space, Identity and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2000). 
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The early theorists of the reform movement that came to be identified with President Khatami saw a free and independent press as a vital part of an Islamic Repub lic. For centuries, they argued, the state had used its control over the media -- first the publication of books, then newspapers and finally radio and television -- to push society toward the rulers’ desired ends. In contrast, the reformers saw a free press as the best way to foster open debate and political and social pluralism, unleashing forces that would allow society at large to determine its own fate. In other words, there could be no pre-determined end, shaped by fiat. Their chosen weapon in the battle for a civil society was the newspaper, a medium with a rich history in Iran of social and political activism. Persian newspapers, particularly those published abroad and smuggled into Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been responsible for remarkable changes in the political landscape. They introduced liberal social and political ideas from Europe and provided readers with a new, simplified language in which to debate such notions. Most important of all, the early press helped create the very idea of society as a political actor in its own right. Within months of Khatami’s move to the Presidential Palace, his new appointees in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance unleashed a “press revolution.” They quickly streamlined the issuing of publication licenses; countered Iran’s traditional centralism by encouraging the rise of local and provincial newspapers; eased the financial hardships of independent publishers; and sought protection under the existing Press Law for controversial editors and commentators facing the hostility of the ruling clerics. The result was a wave of entrepreneurial and journalistic creativity unmatched since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911.

By the spring of 2000, the hard-line clerics had had enough. They used their almost complete control of the public space to shut the door on the “press revolution” and to drive their critics, including many learned clerics, back into private dissent. Dozens of newspapers were closed and prominent journalists were prosecuted, most for violating so-called Islamic norms; anything like public discourse was forced back into the shadows. The ease with which the clerical establishment crushed the free press reflected the basic weaknesses and miscalculations of the reform movement. The senior theologians had established themselves as far back as the Constitutional Revolution as the final arbiters of freedom of expression under Islam. Without a wholesale re-evaluation of the role of the clergy and the very concept of freedom in a religious system of government, this power was destined to go unchecked. The reformers had also put too much emphasis on a free press, in the absence of any other real building blocks of civil society. Newspapers were expected to play the roles of political parties, of independent think tanks and, in the case of Jameah and Tous, of exemplars of social, political and economic independence. It was a burden the Iranian press was simply unable to carry.

Geneive Abdo is former Tehran correspondent for The Guardian (London) newspaper and a past Neiman Fellow at Harvard University. She has just completed her latest book, Answering Only to God, a study of the role of Islam in contemporary Iran, due to be published in the winter by Henry Holt. She is also the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of 1slam (2000). 
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New Media, New Publics: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere of Islam
Jon W. Anderson
Modern information technologies, beginning with the fax and audiocassettes but now exemplified in satellite television and the Internet, have opened the public discourse of Islam to new voices and, more subtlely, to new practices. While media-savvy militants draw the attention of outside observers, a quieter drama is unfolding. Pious middle classes are extending conventional patterns of seeking out religious guidance into new channels, particularly the Internet; the continuous search for role models and reference groups is meeting increasingly modern ways of providing those - namely, media and increasingly media that target specific needs of growing middle classes. These range from religious instructional material for children to be used by parents (where there are no religious schools or as alternatives to them) to religious advice columnists, both conventional (theological opinion) and contemporary (psychological advice) to sermons to selections of news. Once 'private' discourses are on public display, and this public world of Islam is decidedly intimate. Where scholars of print note an officialization of discourse that moves into that medium, and programmatic 'islamizers' of knowledge, politics, etc. generally pursue entextualization strategies, electronic communication is moving Islam into the marketplace and aligning its practices, both metaphorically in the sense that the range of public choice and alternatives expands and literally in the rise of businesses to service these demands.

Jon W. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America. His recent publications include New Media in the Muslim World (2003, co-edited with Dale F. Eickelman) , Arabizing the Internet (1998), and "Globalizing Politics and Religion in the Muslim World" in the Journal of Electronic Pu

blishing (1997, http://www.press. umich.edu/jep/ archive/Anderson.html) . 
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The New Intra-Arab Cultural Space in Form and Content: The Debates Over an American "Letter"
Hassan Mneimneh
The advent of new information technologies (the Internet--email, web, chat rooms--, satellite television, and wide distribution international newspapers) has created a new inter-Arab cultural space, one that is at once unconstrained by the ideological prescriptions associated with nationalism, and beyond the strict control of governments. This new space is of a diffuse decentralized character, reflecting the heterogeneity of the Arab reality that it serves, and the fragmentation of Arab culture. It does, however, also represent the emergence of a new commonality in form, allowing for an amplification of the diffusion and discussion of ideas and topics, on a large-scale participation basis. The Arab reaction to the "What We're Fighting For" open letter, signed and circulated by 60 leading American intellectuals is significant both for its demonstration of the extension and flexibility of this new inter-Arab cultural sphere, and for revealing the need of Arab culture for defining its intellectual outlook in its post-nationalist, post-leftist, Islamist-dominated phase. The purpose of this presentation is to present the Arab reaction and debate generated by the American open letter, as a catalyst, as a case study illustrating the importance and potential of the new inter-Arab cultural space as both a gauge and a generator of culture.

Hassan Mneimneh is a journalist and Co-director, Iraq Documentation Project based in Harvard. 
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