Finding a Place for Islam in Germany: Islamic Organisations under Private and Public Law

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 419-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riem Spielhaus ◽  
Martin Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
German Law ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Federal States ◽  
German Federal States ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Islam In Germany

While in current debates on Islam in Germany recognition is often reduced to incorporation of Islamic organisations under public law, this article demonstrates that German law provides a variety of legal instruments that allow for public involvement of religious communities incorporated under private law. Despite the formal separation of state institutions and religious communities, German law encourages collaboration and visibility of religion in public space. This corresponds with the German constitutional framework that locates religion not (only) in the private, but also in the public sphere. Presenting insights from legal and Islamic studies, this article portrays recent legal measures such as new legislation and treaties concluded by German federal states (Bundesländer) and Islamic organisations that enable Muslim religious practice in public space, like prison chaplaincy and burial according to Islamic rites.

scholarly journals Not Seeing Is Believing: Ritual Practice and Architecture at Chalcolithic Çadır Höyük in Anatolia

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 665
Author(s):  
Laurel Darcy Hackley ◽  
Burcu Yıldırım ◽  
Sharon Steadman
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Central Anatolia ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Animal Bone ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
Private And Public

Chalcolithic religious practice at the site of Çadır Höyük (central Anatolia) included the insertion of ritual deposits into the architectural fabric of the settlement, “consecrating” spaces or imbuing them with symbolic properties. These deposits are recognizable in the archaeological record by their consistent use of ritually-charged material, such as ochre, copper, human and animal bone, and certain kinds of ceramics. During the 800-year period considered in this paper, the material practice of making these ritual deposits remained remarkably consistent. However, the types of spaces where the deposits are made change as shifting social organization reforms the divisions between private and public space.

Konfessionell-kooperativer Religionsunterricht. Zwischenbilanz und Zukunftsperspektiven

2020 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-28
Author(s):  
Henrik Simojoki ◽  
Jan Woppowa
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Educational Innovations ◽  
Regional Variations ◽  
Federal States ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Current State ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
German Federal States ◽  
Further Development

Abstract Enshrined in the Basic Law, Religious Education (RE) in Germany at schools is .confessional. - and hence closely linked to the religious communities, in particular the Catholic and the Protestant church. This does, however, not imply a mono-denominational structure (and even less a catechetical approach) of RE in Germany. On the contrary, due to the ongoing pluralisation, educational innovations and ecumenical progress, inter-denominational cooperation has become a decisive feature of RE in Germany in the last decades, with a plurality of forms and regional variations. This article gives an overview over the current state of this specific type of RE in German federal states. It accentuates conceptual innovations and structural improvements, but also critically reflects on some underlying tendencies which contradict the basic ecumenical and inclusive intention of inter-denominational cooperation. Finally, perspectives for further development are presented.

Access of Muslim Organizations to Religious Instruction in Public Schools: A Comment on the Decision of the Federal Administrative Court of 23 February 2005

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 1319-1334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Zacharias
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Church And State ◽  
German Law ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
Federal States ◽  
Racial Hatred ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
German Federal States

In the last years, several Muslim associations applied at the competent Ministries of Education of the German Federal States for the introduction of Islamic religious instruction in public schools. These applications raise a series of legal questions, in particular, whether the States are obliged to allow associations to teach their version of Islam in schools. Of particular concern is that this religious instruction may not have a religious purpose, but rather a political, or even militant or criminal, purpose. Further, there is the possibility that the associations may invite students to take part in a “holy war”, to call for racial hatred, or to proclaim that women were inferior human beings. The answer to these questions is laid down in Article 7 paragraph 3 of the German Basic Law which is a typical provision of the German Law on Church and State that is molded not by a strict separation or laicism as it is, for instance, in France but by a cooperation of the State and the religious communities.

Occupy Movement, Religion and Social Formations

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Matt Sheedy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures

The Occupy movement was an unprecedented social formation that spread to approximate 82 countries around the globe in the fall of 2011 via social media through the use of myths, symbols and rituals that were performed in public space and quickly drew widespread mainstream attention. In this paper I argue that the movement offers a unique instance of how discourse functions in the construction of society and I show how the shared discourses of Occupy were taken-up and shaped in relation to the political opportunity structures and interests of those involved based on my own fieldwork at Occupy Winnipeg. I also argue that the Occupy movement provides an example of how we might substantively attempt to classify “religion” by looking at how it embodied certain metaphysical claims while contrasting it with the beliefs and practices of more conventionally defined “religious” communities.

Private and Public Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 574-592
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Law And Economics ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
General Criterion ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Ordering ◽  
Public Rights ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Derivatives Of

This chapter explores the relationship between private and public law. In civil law countries, the public-private distinction serves as an organizing principle of the entire legal system. In common law jurisdictions, the distinction is at best an implicit design principle and is used primarily as an informal device for categorizing different fields of law. Even if not explicitly recognized as an organizing principle, however, it is plausible that private and public law perform distinct functions. Private law supplies the tools that make private ordering possible—the discretionary decisions that individuals make in structuring their lives. Public law is concerned with providing public goods—broadly defined—that cannot be adequately supplied by private ordering. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various schools of thought derived from utilitarianism have assimilated both private and public rights to the same general criterion of aggregate welfare analysis. This has left judges with no clear conception of the distinction between private and public law. Another problematic feature of modern legal thought is a curious inversion in which scholars who focus on fields of private law have turned increasingly to law and economics, one of the derivatives of utilitarianism, whereas scholars who concern themselves with public law are increasingly drawn to new versions of natural rights thinking, in the form of universal human rights.

‘Were it not against our laws’: oppression and resistance in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors

Legal Studies ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Heinze
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Legal Norm ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Parent Child

The Comedy of Errors, always loved on the stage, has long been deemed less substantial than Shakespeare's ‘mature’ works. Its references to private and public law have certainly been noted: a trial, a breached contract, a stand-off between monarchical and parliamentary powers. Yet the play's legal elements are more than historical curios within an otherwise light-hearted venture. The play is pervasively structured by an array of socio-legal dualisms: master–servant, husband–wife, native–alien, parent–child, monarch–parliament, buyer–seller. All confront fraught transitions from pre-modern to early modern forms. Those fundamentally legal relationships fuel character and action, even where no conventionally legal norm or procedure is at issue. ‘Errors’ in the play serve constantly to highlight unstable and shifting relationships of dominance and submission. Law undergoes its own transition from feudal–aristocratic to commercial forms. Through a theatrical framing device, it thereby re-emerges to remind us that those dualisms, even in their new incarnations, will remain squarely within law's ambit.

Mocking Parades and the Place of Pagan Statuary in Late Antique Alexandria

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Visual Contact ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.

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