Religious Freedom and Exclusion in Religious Legal Systems: Cases of Bahá’ís in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan

Akif Tahiiev is a post-doctoral research fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt. This post contains the substance of his presentation at the ICLRS 32nd Annual International Law and Religion Symposium, 7 October 2025, at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School.

Introduction

One of the most significant challenges facing contemporary religious systems is the regulation of the rights of religious minorities. Legal systems approach this issue in varied ways, reflecting differences in political philosophy, historical development, and religious traditions. Some states adopt closed-list strategies, explicitly enumerating the communities entitled to recognition. Others employ more universalist frameworks, whereby secular law applies to all, but recognized groups are granted additional rights, most often in areas such as personal status. These divergent approaches shape not only the rights afforded to minorities but also the mechanisms through which exclusion is enforced.

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Border Disputes: Religious Adjudication Along the Private-Public Nexus

Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law and the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law.

In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court was asked to decide a peculiar question: could a state court tell a religious community to shun one of its members? The case involved a husband who refused to grant his wife a Jewish religious divorce, a gett. Under Orthodox Jewish law, without her husband’s consent the woman could not remarry or have children who would be recognized as legitimate. Israeli law, by giving exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce to rabbinical courts, effectively entrenches this discriminatory rule. To mitigate its harshest consequences, state rabbinical courts have long been empowered to impose coercive civil sanctions, executed by the state’s enforcement apparatus: freezing assets, revoking drivers’ licenses, even jailing recalcitrant husbands. But these powers do not always work. In some ultra-Orthodox communities, social shame matters more than loss of liberty. So rabbinical judges began invoking traditional sanctions from medieval Jewish law—calling on neighbors to ostracize the stubborn husband until he relented.

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Islamic Law in the United Kingdom

Brandon Reece Taylorian is an associate lecturer and researcher at the University of Lancashire (UK).

Although the Church of England remains England’s established church and receives special privileges, such as being represented by 26 Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords, the United Kingdom (UK) as a whole is governed under secular laws.[1] While there is no clear separation of church and state enshrined in UK legislation, protections have been created for religious minorities who faced severe discrimination and persecution in previous centuries.[2] The first Muslim community to arrive on British shores comprised sailors recruited in India to work for the East India Company in the sixteenth century. Large-scale immigration of Muslims to Britain began in the post–World War II period, with Muslim migrants from former British colonies—predominantly Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan—recruited in large numbers to help rebuild the country.[3] While these Muslim communities, diverse in themselves, largely integrated with British culture, they naturally sought to maintain their cultural and religious identities. One way they have pursued this is by establishing Sharia councils.

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