Mirjam Künkler

Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences | NIAS-KNAW

The chapter introduces two Iranian female mujtahidahs, Nuṣrat Amīn (1886-1983) and Zuhrah Ṣifātī (1948-), who represent like few other contemporaries the status of female religious authority in 20th century Iran, divided by the important cesura of the 1979 revolution. Nuṣrat Amīn is one of the most influential Shī‘a female religious authorities of...

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Iran presents a puzzle for students of democratic transitions: in four consecutive elections between 1997 and 2001, a democratic-minded opposition won overwhelming majorities at the ballot box. For a period of four years, these electoral victories gave the opposition control of the national legislature, the presidency, and most municipal government...

The chapter addresses the crucial question of how democratic attitudes emerged within the major Muslim civil society groups in Indonesia, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and the Muhammadiyah. Key religious actors and organizations put Islam and democracy on the public agenda and in the process contributed both to the erosion of the authoritarian regime an...

The chapter presents a survey of various instances in which Muslim women, both Sunni and Shiʿi, have become learned in the Islamic religious sciences and wielded religious authority, concentrating on women hadith experts and women jurists. The chapter proposes that the frequent near complete neglect of women as religious authorities throughout the...

The chapter introduces two Iranian female mujtahidāt, Nuṣrat Amīn (1886-1983) and Zuhrah Ṣifātī (1948-), two outstanding female religious authorities of 20 th century Iran. Nuṣrat Amīn is one of the most influential Shī‘a female religious authorities of modern times, who in her own right granted men ijāzāt of ijtihād and riwāya. Zuhrah Ṣifātī is th...

The introduction reviews parts of the literature on religious authority in Islam and asks how the place of women has been conceptualized in these. Apart from providing an overview of the conception and composition of the volume, the chapter ventures some tentative comparative conclusions. It appears that – judging from what we know at present – wom...

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019) was one of Germany’s foremost postwar legal scholars. He coined or popularized key terms and ideas that have left their mark on postwar German political debate to an extent matched by only few, from the chain of legitimation to the concept of the constitution as an ordering frame , the importance of the idea o...

A growing body of research demonstrates that political involvement by Christian religious leaders can undermine the religion's social influence. Do these negative consequences of politicization also extend to Islam? Contrary to scholarly and popular accounts that describe Islam as inherently political, we argue that Muslim religious leaders will we...

With its emphasis on emerging and cutting-edge debates in the study of comparative constitutional law and politics, its suitability for both research and teaching use, and its distinguished and diverse cast of contributors, this handbook is a must-have for scholars and instructors alike. This versatile volume combines the depth and rigor of a schol...

Böckenförde shows how and why the modern state is a product of the historical process of secularization. Three key conflicts between papacy and European kings led to the establishment of administrative, political, and later legal structures independent from the Catholic Church: the Investiture Controversy (1087–1122), the confessional wars of the s...

In this article, Böckenförde tries to determine the proper means of conducting political theology. After dismissing juridical political theology in the vein of Carl Schmitt as not so much theological but rather sociological in its discussion of how original theological terms such as ‘sovereignty’ were transposed to the state, people, or government,...

Part I of the volume brings together Böckenförde’s earliest writings from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. They cover his democratic theory (Chapter I), his documentation of the failure of German Catholicism during the rise of the Nazi regime (Chapter II), Böckenförde’s reflections on the possibilities and limits of Christian conduct in authoritari...

Böckenförde was one of the most outspoken critics of attempts to legalize new biomedical techniques, such as human cloning, therapeutic cloning, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. In this article, he lays out why the legal principle of human dignity, enshrined in Article 1 of the German Basic Law, not only suggests but even requires the prohib...

For decades, Article 1 of the German Basic Law was interpreted in accordance with the view that human dignity belongs to human beings as such. In other words, Article 1 guarantees respect for the dignity of human beings and thus of every individual. In this article—originally published to intense debate in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — Böcke...

This article is a passionate call on the Catholic Church to accept democracy on substantive, not only instrumental grounds, and to grant Catholic believers independence in their electoral choices. Böckenförde here lays out his democratic theory, which is formally built on the three cornerstones of majority rule, individual liberty, and equality, wh...

Part IV contains three articles that reflect Böckenförde’s stance on the right to life, human dignity, and the meta-positive foundations of constitutional law. Over a period of four decades, he repeatedly dealt with the issues of protecting the unborn child on the one hand and women’s right to self-determination on the other. He did so in the conte...

This article is based on a talk Böckenförde gave to the Catholic Student Society in East Berlin in 1965, asking what kind of comportment Christians exhibited during the Nazi regime. He lays out six types of behaviour drawing on individual examples, ranging from opportunism to underground partisanism. Böckenförde is clear from the outset that no typ...

In this 1971 article, Böckenförde investigates German abortion law in the light of contemporaneous public debates about the reform of the at this time almost 100-year-old Section 218 of the German Criminal Code banning abortion. In his view, the constitutional recognition of a right to life must also include unborn human life, since there is otherw...

In this personal reflection, Böckenförde portrays the dilemma he faced during his tenure as a judge on Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court: trying to bridge his Christian Catholic spirituality with his work as a high-ranking public servant in a secular state. He describes his struggle with the Catholic teachings prior to Second Vaticanum, which...

Part III comprises four articles dealing with the relation between theology, law, and political theory. Throughout all of these, Böckenförde clearly distinguishes between the demands on the individual that arise from religion, positive state law, and politics respectively. He also points out that religious legal concepts and state law need not be i...

Is and can religion be seen as a foundation of the modern state? In this article Böckenförde discusses the relationship between state and religion while reviewing Hegel’s main writings on this question. Reconstructing Hegel’s concept of the state, Böckenförde points out that for Hegel, the state is simultaneously universal and historical. It is mor...

This article has been described as constituting the liberal core of Böckenförde’s constitutional thought. Böckenförde lays out why he regards freedom of conscience to be the basis of all modern individual liberties, and indeed, as the basis of the modern concept of freedom itself. The article builds on his work on religious freedom to argue that on...

Part II brings together four articles dealing with aspects of the secularity of the modern state. It opens with one of Böckenförde’s most widely cited articles—translated into seven languages—‘The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization’ published in 1967, in which he lays out the emergence of the modern state as a process of emancipation...

Böckenförde regards ‘ De Libertate Religiosa ’, the declaration of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom, as the belated triumph of liberalism in Church dogma, finally reconciling the truth claims of Catholic teachings with the demands of individual liberty. This was achieved by separating the hitherto unified spheres of law and morality:...

The classic Catholic conception of natural law did not distinguish between morality and law. As such, it increasingly diverged from political thought outside the Church in sixteenth-century Europe, where positive law began to be conceptualized as a means to enable the coexistence of people with different beliefs. Building on Vatican II, when the co...

Böckenförde examines here why almost the entire leadership of organized Catholicism in Germany, that is both of the Church organization and Catholic societal associations, became complicitous in and sometimes actively helped Hitler amend the constitution and dismantle the democratic state. Böckenförde identifies three main reasons for this sudden t...

In this article Böckenförde contrasts his concept of open encompassing neutrality (found in most Scandinavian countries and in Germany) with that of distancing neutrality, as practised in France. While the latter champions negative religious freedom, open encompassing neutrality aims for a balancing of negative and positive religious freedom. Relig...

In this article Böckenförde connects two of the most important concerns throughout his life: the freedom of man and the constitution of the Catholic Church. Böckenförde shows that papal encyclicals are inherently fallible, demonstrated historically for example with reference to magisterial statements on religious freedom, which as late as the ninet...

The chapter consists of excerpts of an interview historian and legal scholar Dieter Gosewinkel conducted with Böckenförde in 2009/2010. The selected sections discuss Böckenförde’s critique of Catholic natural law thinking and the Catholic Church’s position on democracy; his analysis of the failure of Catholic leadership during the Nazi seizure of p...

This second volume in the representative edition in English of Böckenförde's writings brings together his essays on religion, law, and democracy. The volume is organized in five sections: I. the Catholic Church and Political Order; II. State and Secularity; III. the Theology of Law and its Relation to Political Theory; IV. Norms and the Principle o...

The article provides an overview of Böckenförde’s writings on religion, ethos, and the Catholic Church in relation to law, democracy, and the state. It presents Böckenförde as an inner-Catholic critic who attempted to persuade Catholicism that one’s own freedom can be defended only as part of the general freedom. This was finally achieved, at least...

Although it has been claimed that we live in an age of constitutionalism, national and transnational constitutions neither appear as uniform models nor as uncontested means of setting the rules of the game in the political, economic, or religious domain. This book aims to convince readers of a cultural perspective on constitutions. Tying in with th...

Human Rights and Reformist Islam critiques traditional Islamic approaches to the question of compatibility between human rights and Islam and argues instead for their reconciliation from the perspective of a reformist Islam. The book focuses on six controversial case studies: religious discrimination; gender discrimination; slavery; freedom of reli...

Islamic religious authority is conventionally understood to be an exclusively male purview. Yet when Islamic authority is dissected into its various manifestations – leading prayer, preaching, issuing fatwas, transmitting hadith, judging in a religious court, teaching theology, law, and other Islamic sciences, and generally shaping the Islamic scho...

The chapter reviews aspects of the work of one of Germany’s foremost legal scholars in the post-war era: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019), who served as professor of law and as judge on Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court. He contributed like few others to discussions about the central normative frameworks of post-war German constitutional...

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenfördes Werke gelten als rechtswissenschaftliche Klassiker der deutschen Staatsrechtslehre, die auch im Ausland eine breite Rezeption erfahren haben. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit seinen verfassungsgeschichtlichen und verfassungstheoretischen, seinen staatsrechtlichen und staatsphilosophischen Beiträgen ist in verschiedensten Spra...

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde is a much-discussed scholar also beyond German-speaking lands. Over 80 of his articles and two of his monographs have been translated into foreign languages. The articles in this (German language) collection analyze the reception of his work in the academic as well as political, cultural, and religious discourses of Italy...

Excerpt: The 1990s and 2000s saw a proliferation of new works on religion and secularization, particularly in the fields of political theory, international relations, and the anthropology of religion. It must have been to David Martin’s enormous chagrin that much of this work implicitly reinvented his major theses, proclaiming with fanfare that God...

Cambridge Core - Constitutional and Administrative Law - Regulating Religion in Asia - edited by Jaclyn L. Neo

Introductory Article to Special Issue. Taken together, the articles make two original contributions: first, no previous work has satisfactorily analyzed the institutions under review. They are thus highly relevant empirical contributions to the study of religion-state relations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Brunei. In particular, the Majeli...

There are several reasons why one would today turn to the work of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde; a judge in Germany's Federal ConstitutionalCourt who authored one of the highest number of dissenting opinions in the court's history (two of which later became the majority opinion). Böckenförde (b. 1930) is one of Europe's foremost public law scholars an...

Outside Germany, especially in North American scholarship, Böckenförde has been viewed predominantly, if at all, through a Schmittian lens. Although Böckenförde was not one of Carl Schmitt's students—he studied after the war and Schmitt was barred from teaching after 1945—the two were in close contact from the mid-1950s until Schmitt's death in 198...

It is hard to overstate the influence that Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde has had on the development of German constitutional law scholarship, or Staatsrechtslehre. A Schmittian since the early 1950s, he consistently proved himself to be a staunch liberal—even when his constitutional convictions clashed with his catholic beliefs, such as in the case of...

This introduction lays out the rationale behind the special issue examining Böckenförde's concepts and arguments in light of contemporary crises of democracy. Considering the enormous challenges facing democracies today, how should one judge Böckenförde's optimistic view of the regulatory capabilities of the state? Is it irrelevant, given the de fa...

This special issue of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (Vol. 7(1)) on ‘Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: Inner-Catholic Critic and Advocate of Open Neutrality’, introduces the main features of Böckenförde thought with regard to law, religion, and democracy. Böckenförde emerged early as an inner-Catholic critic that -prior to Vatican II- called on t...

Cambridge Core - Sociology of Religion - A Secular Age beyond the West - edited by Mirjam Künkler

In the introduction to this special issue, we make the case for ‘de-centring’ the study of Shiʿi Islam, conceptually, spatially and sociologically. After first noting the essentialization of Shiʿi identity within the contemporary public sphere, we question its spatialization within the modern world of nation-states and area studies, and contrast th...

What role do and should constitutions play in mitigating intense disagreements over the religious character of a state? And what kind of constitutional solutions might reconcile democracy with the type of religious demands raised in contemporary democratising or democratic states? Tensions over religion-state relations are gaining increasing salien...

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (b. 1930) is one of Europe's foremost legal scholars and political thinkers. As a scholar of constitutional law and a judge on Germany's Federal Constitutional Court (December 1983 - May 1996), Böckenförde has been a major contributor to contemporary debates in legal and political theory, to the conceptual framework of th...

This article introduces a special issue on female Islamic authority in contemporary Asia. It provides an overview of the literature on religious authority in Islam and briefly lays out which modes of female religious authority have been more accepted than others in the schools of jurisprudence. Based on the articles included in this issue, the intr...

Introduction to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist. The five articles included in the special issue highlight the various ways through which cultural, social, and political contexts affect the balance struck between rights protection and religious accommodation. The contributors accentuate the influence of domestic actors — key elites...

The article analyzes the evolution of state law pluralism in the field of personal status law in India and Indonesia in the postcolonial era. Having inherited pluri-legal personal law systems from their colonial patrons, postindependence leaders in both countries vowed to eliminate and replace pluri-legal arrangements by uniform civil law systems t...

Report on Conference "Constitutionalism, Religious Freedom and Human Rights: Constitutional Migration and Transjudicialism beyond the North Atlantic" held at Schloss Herrenhausen, Hanover, Germany, June 3-6, 2015

The article examines state-supported religious education and its consequences for civic attitudes in Indonesia and Israel, two democracies that grant religion a prominent place in the public sphere, particularly in education. The comparison reveals that while in Indonesia the state was able to gradually introduce a secular curriculum in religious s...

The article addresses the relevance of Charles Taylor’s analysis in his influential magnum opus A Secular Age (2007) to those parts of the world which are not included in the North-Atlantic world on which he concentrates. It does so by discussing issues arising from case studies of Asian, African and Middle Eastern contexts where the impact of diff...

This article compares the strategies through which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes “the religious” in the post-independence period. We show that the dominant approach pursued by the Indian state has been one of judicialization—the delegation of religious question...

The students of transnational flows, including James Rosenau,1 have pertinentlyhighlighted the growing assertion of ‘sovereign free actors’ at the expense of‘sovereign bound actors’ in what they call postinternational politics.2 Dealingmostly with the end of the Cold War era, they have tended to focus on theincreasingly important role of not only t...