Law, the State, and Public Order

Regulating Religion in Contemporary Egypt

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4085306
AutoresMona Oraby (0009-0006-8351-4454, Amherst College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen52
Número3
Páginas574-602
Fecha de publicación2018-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLaw & Society Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0023-9216 • E-ISSN: 1540-5893
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/lasr.12353
OpenAlexW2898111182
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas41

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

Bureaucracy · Economics · Field (mathematics · Jurisprudence · Law and economics · Legal positivism · Legal realism · Legal research · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Secularism · Sincerity · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of law · Sociology of religion · State (computer science · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Religion, Society, and Development