This Thursday, November 29, I’ll be giving a lecture, “Equality for Christians in the Middle East, Yesterday and Today,” at the Armenian Orthodox seminary in New Rochelle, New York. My lecture will discuss the precarious state of Christian communities in the Middle East and the reasons why the goal of real legal equality has proved so elusive. Details are here. CLR Forum readers in the neighborhood, please stop by and say hello!
Panel: Islam and Politics
On November 29, the New York City Bar Association will host a panel, “Islam and Politics.” According to the organizers, the event will “focus on the role of religion in Muslim majority States, especially as it pertains to competition both among Sunnis, Shi’a, and Salafists as well as between Muslims and other religious minorities.” Details are here.
Coptic Church Names New Pope
A follow up to Thursday’s post: on Sunday, the Coptic Orthodox Church named its 118th pope, Tawadros, a bishop from the Upper Nile region. Pope Tawadros now has what Walter Russell Mead ruefully calls “the toughest job in the world”: negotiating for the Christian minority in an Egypt governed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, as well as their political rivals, the even more fundamentalist Salafists, have talked about increasing the role of Islamic law in Egypt. The National (United Arab Emirates) reports:
At the center of the political squabbling in Egypt is the role of Islam in the country’s new constitution, currently being drafted. . . . Christians, along with liberal and secularists, oppose demands by Islamists to increase the role of Shariah. The prospects of a stronger role for Islamic law in legislation increase the community’s concern of further marginalization, or of a curtailing of their rights of worship and expression.
Al Jazeera also has interesting coverage, including a group interview with scholars and representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Coptic Church.
Levy-Rubin on Dhimmi Restrictions
Here’s an interesting post about an essay, written by Hebrew University Professor Milka Levy-Rubin, in a recent book from the University of Pennsylvania Press, Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (2011). Levy-Rubin’s essay, “Shurut Umar: From Early Harbingers to Systematic Enforcement,” discusses the development of classical Islamic law restrictions on “protected” peoples, or dhimmis, including Christians and Jews. She asserts that these restrictions, which date from the notional seventh-century “Pact of Umar,” were more or less uniform throughout the Muslim world, not idiosyncratic or haphazard, although enforcement of the restrictions may have varied. The rules included prohibitions on crosses, churches, processions, and certain kinds of dress, as well as payment of the jizya, or poll tax. The essay looks worthwhile for anyone interested in the history of fiqh restrictions on religious minorities.
Jury Nullifies Charges Against Rastafarian Accused of Growing Marijuana
Last week, a New Hampshire jury nullified criminal charges brought against a 59 year-old Rastafarian accused of growing 15 marijuana plants near his home. The defendant, Doug Darrell, claimed that the marijuana was used as part of his religious practices. The defense attorney sought a jury nullification instruction and it was granted by Belknap County Superior Court Judge James O’Neill. According to one report, the judge gave the following instruction: “Even if you find that the State has proven each and every element of the offense charged beyond a reasonable doubt, you may still find the defendant not guilty if you have a conscientious feeling that a not guilty verdict would be a fair result in this case.” The marijuana plants were spotted by a National Guard helicopter as part of a coordinated operation with NH State Police.
This case raises questions as to whether jury nullification is a viable way to protect the rights of religious minorities from criminal prosecution. Read one way, this case may suggest that jury nullification is a tool for local communities to protect the rights of such minorities from the unintended consequences of a generally applicable law. Rastafarianism is by no means a popular religion in the US (I daresay this is especially true in the Granite State), and I doubt that NH legislators had the religion in mind when they passed the law prohibiting marijuana possession. Yet a group of twelve citizens decided not to apply the neutral, generally applicable law (see Employment Division v. Smith) because it substantially burdened one adherent’s beliefs.
Read another way, jury nullification only worked here because of a number of other factors, unrelated to Mr. Darrell’s religion. In fact, one juror stated that Mr. Darrell’s religion had nothing to do with the jury’s decision. One cannot ignore, for example, the fact that this case involved a criminal act many people are familiar with and do not consider wrongful (i.e. growing marijuana for personal use). I wonder if the jury would have nullified had Mr. Darrell been a member of the Santeria religion charged with animal cruelty (see Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah). Another aspect is the personal story involved. Mr. Darrell is a 59 year-old, mild-mannered man who has been married for 38 years and has 4 grown children, who are “successful in their fields.” Again, I wonder if the jury would have nullified had Mr. Darrell been a loud, unrepenting agitator, arrested while picketing military funerals (See Snyder v. Phelps).
Jury nullification, therefore, seems like one way to protect religious minorities from prosecution. However, whether a jury will actually do so depends much less on the lofty ideals of respect for religious freedom or diversity and more on the mundane issues of familiarity and likeability.
Yildirim on Turkey’s Draft Constitution
The Forum 18 Blog has an interesting article by Mine Yildirim (Åbo Akademi University) on the freedom of religion provisions in a draft constitution currently under consideration in Turkey. The ruling Islamist AKP party and the opposition secularist CHP party have agreed on some provisions, but not all, and Yildirim describes the result as a mixed bag. For example, for the first time, the constitution will contain a clause conferring a right to change one’s religion. As Yildirim points out, many majority-Muslim countries reject such a right, and the AKP deserves some credit for accepting the language (though Islamists sometimes interpret such language to confer only a right to convert to Islam). On the other hand, the AKP has refused to discontinue compulsory religion classes in public schools. Minorities, especially Alevis, claim these classes amount to proselytism, and the ECtHR has agreed on at least one occasion (Zengin v. Turkey). Also, the AKP rejected the CHP’s proposal for a clause stating that “the state is impartial toward all religions and beliefs in all its proceedings and actions and will respect social pluralism based on the diversity of religions, beliefs and opinions.” The AKP argued that such a provision would invalidate the state’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, which has a major role in promoting Sunni Islam in Turkey. Here’s Yildirim’s closing paragraph:
The challenge for the AKP – as the current ruling party – remains to devise policies which genuinely respect the religious freedom of Turkey’s increasingly pluralistic society. This starts with the Constitution and also includes other legislative changes to protect religious freedom in line with the country’s existing human rights commitments. The AKP’s non-recognition of Alevi cem houses (places of worship), insistence on the compulsory [religious education] lessons, strengthening the Diyanet’s position as a publicly-funded religious institution, and the comments of AKP politicians, indicate that the party fails to devise policies that respect Turkey’s pluralistic reality and observe the principle of impartiality on the part of the state.
Alawites, Alevis, and Secularism in the Middle East
I’ve written before on CLR Forum about the plight of the Middle East’s Christians. As religious minorities, Christians favor state secularism; the revolutions of the Arab Spring, which have tended to bring Islamist parties to power, offer Christians as much to fear as to praise. But Christians are not the only religious minorities in the Middle East. As this very interesting essay by Baylor historian Philip Jenkins explains, Alawites in Syria and Alevis in Turkey — two different groups, despite the similar-sounding names — number in the tens of millions. Both groups consider themselves Muslim, but some of their beliefs and practices differ dramatically from both Sunni and Shia Islam. For example, Alawites and Alevis drink wine and celebrate some Christian and Zoroastrian holidays; they do not veil women. Most Muslims, and certainly most Islamists, dismiss them as heretical.
Like Christians, Alawites and Alevis have tended to support secular parties: the Ba’ath Party in Syria and Kemalist parties in Turkey. Jenkins explains:
[B]oth movements . . . represented powerful bastions against religious extremism in the region, as they had everything to lose from any enforcement of strict Sunni Muslim orthodoxy. Both sects were powerfully invested in secularism, which in a Middle Eastern context usually meant Read more
First Things on the Destruction of Khachkars
First Things’s always worthwhile On the Square blog has an interesting post on the destruction of Armenian carved stone crosses, or khachkars, in Turkey and Azerbaijan. The khachkar (literally, “cross-stone”) is a traditional Armenian art form; an analogue would be the familiar Celtic high cross. Crosses have a central place in Armenian Christian iconography, and khachkars, which can reach a few feet in height, dot the landscape in Armenia and in other places where Armenians have lived. Khachkars appear in cemeteries, in church courtyards, in homes, on roadsides; really, anywhere.
Two years ago, UNESCO added the art of khachkar carving to the list of intangible cultural heritage meriting special protection in international law. As the First Things post makes clear, however, Turkey and Azerbaijan have undertaken to destroy khachkars that exist in those countries:
The last of the largest collections of khachkars, the Armenian Cemetery in Jugha in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, was purposefully annihilated in 2005 after several years of intermittent Read more
More on Syria’s Christians
As I wrote here last fall, Syria’s Christians have shown a lot of ambivalence about the civil war taking place in their country. Assad runs a police state, but his secular government protects Christians, who make up about 10% 0f the population, allowing them churches, schools, and community centers. When Syria’s Christians consider the persecution of Iraqi Christians that followed the fall of Saddam, and the persecution of Coptic Christians that followed the fall of Mubarak, they wonder what a “democratic” government in Syria would do for them. Not without reason, they worry that the Sunni opposition, if it ever gained power, would be less concerned with their human rights than the Ba’ath Party.
Two recent articles provide some background on the situation. The first is an essay in the New York Times by Clark University historian Taner Akcam, whose recent book I noted here. Akcam writes that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recip Erdogan has been speaking a lot lately about the need to protect human rights in Syria. Erdogan’s statements are unlikely to reassure Syrian Christians, Akcam Read more
Tsitselikis on Aspects of Legal Communitarianism in Greece
Konstantinos Tsitselikis (U. of Macedonia) has posted Aspects of Legal Communitarianism in Greece: Between Millet and Citizenship. The abstract follows.
Legal and political percepts pertaining to ethnic belonging in Greece are closely linked to the ideological understanding of Greekness, a legacy of the Ottoman Greek-Orthodox millet system. Complementary to this image of the national self, minority protection law on Muslims and Jews was and still is partially formed through millet-like paradigms. Greece’s territorial expansion made all inhabitants of the annexed provinces Greek citizens en masse: in addition to those that were deemed eligible to belong to the Greek nation, Jewish and Muslim communities also acquired Greek citizenship. For these communities the self-autonomy of the Ottoman millet structure in education and religious matters was transformed into minority protection, through special rights (community schools, Moufti’s jurisdiction, Muslim foundations, military conscription) attributable through religion to citizens of the state.