Category Archives: Section Chair

From the faculty profile page – Political Science Department, University of Chicago:

Iza Hussin’s recent work has focussed upon the mobility of law and legal projects in empire, and upon the politics of Islamic law in both contemporary and colonial periods. Her book on the transformation of Islamic law and the Muslim state during British colonisation in India, Malaya and Egypt, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Recent publications in journals and edited volumes include: “The Pursuit of the Perak Regalia: Law and the Making of the Colonial State,” Law and Social Inquiry 32:3 (2007); “Ethnicity, Religion and the Paradox of Jurisdiction: Two Malaysian Cases,” Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, 2010; and “The Making of Islamic Law: Local Elites and Colonial Authority in British Malaya,” in Thomas Dubois, ed. Casting Faiths: Technology and the Creation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia, Palgrave Macmillan 2008. Her new research includes a collaborative project on Internet fatwa and a second book project on the mobility of law across the Indian Ocean arena.

Professor Hussin’s work is based upon comparative, archival and textual research in Arabic, Malay and English texts across various sites of empire and legal transformation, and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has been a Fellow in Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and is a recipient of awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Convention of Asia Scholars.

Iza Hussin 2012 – 2014

Political Science Department – University of Chicago

Ahmet T. Kuru

Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
San Diego State University

Home Page

Rearch Interests:

Comparative Politics, Religion and Politics, Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies

Books:

Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan (2012)

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Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey
(2009)

Ahmet T. Kuru
San Diego State University

Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is “passive secularism,” which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is “assertive secularism,” which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien régime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.

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