Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- Haaretz: An 81-year-old lawyer and refugee from the Nazis is suing El Al Airlines for gender discrimination after she was moved from her seat to make way for an ultra-Orthodox man on a flight from the U.S. to Israel.
- In Pakistan, right-wing Islamist leaders are publicly voicing their disapproval of a new law that criminalizes violence against women, stating that the law is contrary to the Quran and will lead to a rise in divorce.
- A man in Russia who wrote, “there is no God,” in an internet exchange is now facing a jail sentence for insulting the feelings of religious believers.
- A polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sect is on trial in a federal court in Phoenix for spying on and harassing non-members.
- Asia Times: Bangladesh could drop Islam as the country’s official religion following a string of extremist attacks against people of other faiths.
- The International Criminal Court is now hearing a case regarding the 2012 destruction of Timbuktu’s religious sites by an Islamist fighter.
- Haaretz: The distribution of U.S. federal funds for Holocaust survivors has begun—the allocation is a tranche of $12 million to be distributed over five years and is part of an initiative launched in late 2013 by Vice President Joe Biden.
- ABC: A leading pastor in a Chinese province where authorities have been cracking down on churches has been barred from the pulpit and removed as head of the provincial state-sanctioned Protestant church association.
- In Lexington, Nebraska, city officials have informed Somali immigrants that their chosen place of worship, a former laundromat, violates local zoning laws. They posted notices on the building and requested an order from a judge to relocate the mosque.
- India’s Supreme Court is considering the feasibility of implementing a ban on jokes or negative remarks about Sikhs.
- NYT: Less than a year after the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, conservative lawmakers across the country are pushing for a new round of legal protections for opponents of gay rights.
agenda in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, it merged the concept of political Islam with the previously secular readings of the republican doctrine of state. This book provides an analysis of the constitutional and institutional structure of public power in the most emblematic instance of a theocratic republic to date: the Islamic Republic of Iran, using the methods of political science. Nearly four decades after the 1979 revolution, a thorough evaluation of Iran’s prevalently anti-modernist political discourse and concurrent claims of republican popular sovereignty is here carried out and their theoretical coherence and applied success investigated. Vahid Nick Pay surveys the major republican schools of political philosophy on the one hand, and the principal narratives of the prevailing Shi’a political theology on the other, to provide a pioneering evaluation of the republican credentials of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It will be essential reading for scholars of political science and modern Iranian politics and history.