Regulating Religion in Asia: Norms, Modes, and Challenges

Description

In recent years, law and religion scholarship has increasingly emphasized the need to study the interaction of legal and religious ideas and institutions, norms and practices. The overall question that this scholarship explores may be stated as follows: how do legal and religious ideas and institutions, methods and mechanisms, beliefs and believers influence each other, for better and for worse, in the past, present and future? This volume engages this area of scholarship by examining how law regulates religion, and how religion responds to such regulations. It examines underlying norms influencing state regulation of religion, and challenges emerging from such regulation. Importantly, this volume will go beyond the conventional enquiries that draw upon the Anglo-European approaches and experiences, and emphasize instead Asian perspectives in order to expand and build upon existing understandings about the complex relationship between law and religion.

Jaclyn L. Neo is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She specializes in constitutional law, human rights law, and comparative constitutional law and religion. She is the sole editor of a recently published volume on Constitutional Interpretation in Singapore: Theory and Practice (2016) and has been a guest editor for special issues in the Singapore Academy of Law Journal, the Journal of International and Comparative Law, and the Journal of Law, Religion, and State. Her articles have been published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-CON), Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Human Rights Quarterly, and the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies. Arif A. Jamal is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS). He serves on the Executive Committee of NUS's Centre for Asian Legal Studies and as an Editor with the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. His research and teaching interests include legal and political theory, law and religion and law in Muslim contexts. Arif's publications are forthcoming or have appeared in the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion and the Journal of Law, Religion and State. His most recent book is Islam, Law and the Modern State: (Re)imagining Liberal Theory in Muslim Contexts (2018). Daniel P. S. Goh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in comparative-historical sociology and studies state formation, race and multiculturalism, Asian urbanisms, and religion, and has published over forty articles on these subjects in journals and books. He has edited and co-edited several books, including Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (2009), Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (2014), Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (2017), and Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity: Past and Present (2017).

'The strength of Regulating Religion in Asia lies in its detailed case studies, which show the diversity of different states' relationships with the religions in their jurisdictions. By taking a broad definition of regulation, the book goes beyond the broad constitutional idea of freedom of religion into the complex practicalities of regulating religion. In doing so, the different chapters also highlight the wide variety of political ideologies and the methods of regulating religion, which are practiced by the different states.' Helen Pausacker, Journal of Law and Religion