Yüksel Sezgin

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Syracuse University

The Muslim Family Law Index (MFL-I) measures the extent to which Muslim Family Laws (MFLs) comply with specific human/women’s rights and the rule of law and standards. The MFL-I assigns country/year scores ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more reformed the national MFL system; hence greater adherence to human/women’s rights and the...

35 Muslim-majority and 18 Muslim-minority countries formally integrate Muslim Family Laws (mfl s) into their legal systems. Both groups of governments have undertaken legislative reforms to improve the status of women/children under mfl s and strengthen the rule of law within their mfl systems. The existing scholarship does not address whether mfl...

Thirty‐five Muslim‐majority and eighteen Muslim‐minority countries formally integrate Muslim Family Laws (MFLs) into their legal systems and enforce them through state courts. Both Muslim‐majority and Muslim‐minority governments have undertaken legislative reforms to alleviate the effects of religious laws on fundamental human rights, increase acco...

Ghana has inherited colonial legislation that recognizes and regulates the consequences of Muslim family law (MFL). However, in practice, courts almost never recognize the normative existence of MFL and systematically dismiss the cases on procedural grounds without discussing their merits. What explains the judiciary’s attitudes toward Islamic law?...

Should a democratic regime formally incorporate religious laws and courts into its otherwise secular legal system? This is not a hypothetical question. Some democratic nations already formally integrate religion-based laws in the field of family law (especially Muslim Family Law - MFL). Although state-enforced MFLs often affect human rights negativ...

Five days after the attempted coup d’état of 15 July 2016, a state of emergency was declared in Turkey. Under the emergency rule, constitutional rights and liberties are suspended and parliament and the courts are reduced to the regime's rubber stamp, while the country is ruled by one man through decrees. While many question how the legal and polit...

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...

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...

About one-third of the world's population currently lives under pluri-legal systems where governments hold individuals subject to the purview of ethno-religious rather than national norms in respect to family law. How does the state-enforcement of these religious family laws impact fundamental rights and liberties? What resistance strategies do peo...

The articles assembled in this symposium share their roots in a workshop we organized at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISJ) in Onati, Spain, in June 2011. The workshop, titled “Legal Pluralism and Democracy. When Does Legal Pluralism Enhance, When Does It Erode Legitimacy of and Trust in Democratic Institutions?” examined t...

The main premise of this Essay is that personal status laws, whether based on Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu tradition, are men-made (implying that no females were involved in this process), socio-political constructions that have come invariably to discriminate against women and deny them equal rights in familial relations. However, women do not silentl...

In this chapter, Sezgin shows that although religion-based personal status laws discriminate against women, women do not just sit silently on the sidelines and acquiesce in violation of their fundamental rights at the hands of male-dominated religious institutions. On the contrary, women’s groups all over the world are spearheading a silent rights...

Israel still maintains a highly pluralistic personal status system (millet) that it inherited from the Ottoman Empire. Under this archaic system, religious courts of fourteen ethno-religious communities, staffed with their very own judges who apply religious and customary laws of their own communities, are granted exclusive jurisdiction over matter...

How do states consolidate their legal systems? Do all states follow the same trajectory of state-building and legal unification? And, particularly how do post-colonial states respond to legally pluralistic regimes that they inherit at the time of independence? These are some of the questions that this article will attempt to shed light upon by clos...

Despite its prevalence in academic circles both as a sociological and political phenomenon - particularly among anthropologists, lawyers, social scientists and alike - legal pluralism has long been neglected by international organizations and donor agencies which have recognized solely the legal system of the state and systematically refused (on id...

Customary religious legal systems have been utilized in various areas from fighting against crime to such mundane affairs as setting the price of goods and services in the market place or regulating personal and familial relations. Against this background, the present study will exclusively focus its lenses on so-called personal status systems as q...

The different types of legal pluralism have been extensively studied by many anthropologists and legal scholars. But what about the intensity or degree of pluralism? Does this always stay the same or does it ever change over time? Legal pluralism is the reflection of complex human interactions in our normative universe. It changes as a society evol...

How do states consolidate their legal systems? Do all states follow the same trajectory of state-building and legal unification? And, particularly how do post-colonial states respond to legally pluralistic regimes that they inherit at the time of independence? These are some of the questions that this article will attempt to shed light upon by clos...

How can one account for the resurgence of religiously-inspired political movements and parties throughout the globe? Or more specifically, how can we explain the rising power of religious parties like Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (JDP) and Israel’s Shas Party in the Middle East? Who are the people running these parties, ex-clergy, ideolog...

The questions of “why some countries are rich and some others are poor” (North and Thomas 1973; Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986; Diamond 1999; Landes 1999) or “what it would take for less developed countries to break their vicious circle and join the club of the rich” (Corbo, Krueger, and Ossa 1985; De Soto 2000; Easterly 2001) have long occupied the m...

The questions of “why some countries are rich and some others are poor” or “what it would take for less developed countries to break their vicious circle and join the club of rich” have long occupied the minds of the students of development studies. However, a new generation of scholars who are focusing on the comparative performance of less develo...

As a result of the February 28, 1997, incident, Islamist parties have been ostracized and excluded from governmental politics. This has caused serious legitimacy, participation and representation crises in the Turkish polity. This study examines whether the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP) landslide victory in the No...

This article attempts to answer the question of what made the Turkish threats in the 1998 October crisis with Syria different from all others made over the last two decades and the main reasons for Hafiz al-Asad's capitulation to them. Using prospect theory, this article argues that it was not the changing balance of power or the deterring effect o...

Like many immature and fledgling democracies Israel has suffered from the same disease which causes instability, inefficiency, maladministration, corruption, bribery, extortion and anarchy. However, unlike other countries, Israel has invented its own medication to cure the ills of its democratic system. This unprecedented "magic remedy" provided Is...

(Like many immature and fledgling democracies Israel has suffered from the same disease, whieh eauses instability, ineCficieney, maladministration, eorrnption, bribery, extortion and anarchy. However, unlike other eountries, Israel has invented its own medication to eure the ilis of its democratic system. This unpreccdented \"magie remedy\" providc...

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the issue of Islam and of its supposed challenge to the West has become a matter of enduring international preoccupation. In this context, both Muslim and Western statesmen and scholars have presented contradictory statements and opinions which have revolved around Huntington’s concept of "clash of civilisation...

Throughout history, the magical language of Islam and its sacred vocabulary have been employed by many rulers (either Muslim or non-Muslim) and politically or religiously motivated opposition movements in order to legitimise their attitudes before public opinion, criticise existing orders or mobilise individuals and institutions. This language is a...

This paper provides a political analysis of legal pluralism from a “new institutionalist” perspective. In response to question of why states recognize and incorporate non-state normative orderings into their legal systems, it is hypothesized that the decision of incorporation is made to enhance the capacities of postcolonial states with “rational”...

Do women have equal rights under Islamic, Jewish or Hindu laws? As far as the actual practice is concerned, the answer is not an affirmative one, as most religious traditions have historically discriminated against women particularly in familial relations. Moreover, in most religious traditions human agency is usually prohibited from interfering wi...