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Law, the State, and Public Order: Regulating Religion in Contemporary Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mona Oraby
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Abstract

A substantial scholarship has studied the extent to which states across the political and geographic spectrums rely on legal, bureaucratic, and judicial institutions to govern religion. However, a deeper inquiry into the mechanisms through which regulation occurs has yet been achieved. This article foregrounds conversion, understood as mobility between social groups in which belief and sincerity may figure but is not reducible to either, to observe these dynamics. Through an analysis of Egyptian jurisprudence on the right to change religion as well as interviews with complainants and litigators, the article challenges widespread assumptions about who and what constitute the regulatory field. It also shows how religious difference is produced in the legal-bureaucratic encounter. By accounting for institutions that are not typically considered part of the regulatory field nor thought to be bound by the strictures of legal positivism, this article further occasions a rethinking of the public–private distinction within critiques of secularism.

Type
Special Issue Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 574 - 602
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

For offering critical feedback and sage advice on various drafts of this article, I thank the participants of the Law, Politics, and Religion in Muslim-Majority States Workshop at Simon Fraser University (and Tamir Moustafa, Michael Peletz, and Jeffrey Sachs in particular), the participants of the APSA-POMEPS Middle East and North Africa Research and Publication Conference in Tunis (and Nathan Brown and Steven Heydemann in particular), Pinky Hota, Austin Sarat, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for the Law & Society Review. The Buffett Institute for Global Studies and The Graduate School at Northwestern University made possible the fieldwork for this study. Generous research funding was also provided by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs through the Politics of Religious Freedom Project, co-directed by Peter Danchin, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. Residence at the Center for Law, Society, and Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law as the 2016–2017 Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow afforded me the time to write an initial draft and to present my findings.

References

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