Muslim divorce practice is a feminist issue, insofar as it often departs from core principles of Anglo-American divorce law. When legal feminists have examined the reception of Muslim divorce practice in common-law courts, they have tended to measure those departures in terms of financial outcome. There is a danger that, in consequence, our theory of Muslim women's legal agency is reduced to pragmatic matters of choice, money and advantage-taking. That theory seems hugely impoverished when read against the political background in Britain, where Muslims‘ legal agency upon divorce is bound up with deeper questions of belonging and allegiance. Feminist work ought to be able to advance a theory of citizens’ commitment to civil law in litigation which can give a complex account even of the unsettling litigation of Muslim divorce disputes in civil courts. This article draws on existing work in feminist multiculturalism to sketch the beginnings of that theory.

Faith schools have (re)gained an increasingly prominent place within the public education system in the UK. Whilst the former Labour government expanded the number of state-funded faith schools during its terms in office, they continue to be supported by the current coalition government. The expansion of faith schooling has continued despite widespread opposition attributing much of the religious divisions and lack of community cohesion within society to faith schooling, particularly after ‘race riots’ in the north of England in 2001. This article does not seek to contribute to the largely polarised debate arguing either for or against faith schools. Instead, I explore how religion circulates in governmental discourse supporting faith schools and the sociopolitical work it does through law. I focus on the key contention put forward particularly by the former Labour government that faith schools, contrary to being divisive, can actually play an important role in the promotion of community cohesion, precisely because of the values and ethos of these schools. I examine how this governmental discourse is influenced by social capital and communitarian theories that highlight the role of Christian or church school values in fostering citizenship and community cohesion through education. I suggest that the influence of these theories on government policy has led to church schools becoming a benchmark for other schools to emulate, especially where they embody state/British values which are sometimes posited as being universal and secular. Rather than the expansion of faith schools being a policy that supports schools of all faiths, Muslim schools in particular have been singled out as posing a potential ‘threat to the nation’ and the social cohesion within it. In addition, I argue that the often invisibilised normative influence of de-theologised Christian/secular values plays a role in regulating the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ religion. The potential effects of delimiting religion through the discourse of values, coupled with the engendering of citizenship and belonging of children from minority religious/ethnic backgrounds within the education system, might also be viewed as effectively resulting in a form of ‘racial upliftment’. My analysis draws on critical religion and race perspectives that remain largely absent within socio-legal scholarship on law and religion and indeed citizenship. One exception is more recent scholarship on gender and the banning of Muslim religious dress in schools and other public spaces, and the recognition of certain areas of Muslim family law within Western legal systems. However, analyses that attend to the contingent ways in which religion can circulate and be produced through law relating to children are urgently needed alongside those attending to gender.

The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within this framework, the state is understood as advancing the goal of protecting the ‘encultured subject’ from the disempowering effects of her religion. The author departs from this trend by reading the Canadian controversy over Islamic family law arbitration against a legal landscape that already authorises and encourages parties to settle matters of property division and support through private ordering. The author argues that faith-based arbitration and its normative driver, multiculturalism, were already nested within the domain of privatisation and neoliberal ideals of choice, liberty and autonomy. Facilitation of private ordering in family law paved the way for faith-based arbitration. Through a close reading of Supreme Court of Canada family law jurisprudence about the enforcement of marital contracts, the author argues that concerns more properly directed at privatisation per se have been aimed at the putative content of religious norms. The author offers a policy proposal that addresses these concerns as they arise in the context of faith-based arbitration.

Political liberalism suggests state power must be exercised and justified on terms all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse, independently of their comprehensive identities or worldviews. For Rawls, a democratic community cannot be united by any shared ends or identities other than those connected with the political conception of justice itself. Republican political thought often seems to undermine this ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ through its stronger demands of social cohesion and participative civic virtue. Conversely, however, it generally seeks to define citizenship independently of any non-political commonalities citizens might be assumed to share. This theoretical tension was reflected in recent French republican discourses on Islam, gender and national identity. France's recent prohibition on public face-veiling coincided with an officially orchestrated debate on national identity which seemed to challenge the traditional republican conception of national identity as a purely civic and political construct. While couched in republican terminologies, these recent discourses seemed to understand the principle of laïcité, or constitutional secularism, as a bulwark for the pre-political dimensions of national identity. Accordingly, this article outlines how these discourses on religion and gender illuminated tensions and contradictions within the prevailing republican account of national identity.

This article analyses the legal processes of recognising customary and religious (Muslim) marriages in South Africa's constitutional democracy. It argues that the best interpretation of the Constitution requires laws that address cross-cutting issues of recognition and redistribution relating to religion/culture and gender, and that the best way to achieve this is through a ‘pluralistic solidarity’ that enables dialogue on how to secure cultural and religious recognition without undermining the rights of women. It examines how the different processes of cultural/religious law reform in South Africa have become sites of struggle over the meaning of collective and individual identity, public/private power, citizenship and rights, and gender and democracy, and how particular sociopolitical conditions, ideological struggles and overarching conflicts and interests have shaped each process of law reform. Thus it distinguishes between the ideal and the possible, the normative and the strategic, in law reform. It notes the conditions under which the incomplete process of recognition of Muslim marriage law has seen a greater deference to religious norms and private regulation than customary law reform, which saw a greater institutionalisation of gender equality norms. The article concludes by emphasising the open-ended nature of legal processes, the possibilities of using courts to challenge ongoing inequalities in religion and custom, and the ever-present role of politics in legal outcomes.

The intersections of gender, religion and migration status have attracted only limited commentary to date. The significance of migration status as a marker of gender inequality, and one that further increases the burden of intersecting axes of discrimination, requires further scrutiny. This article examines the rise of civic integration requirements within the European Union and the significance of this rise for religious freedoms and complex ideals of gender equality. Particular attention is given to recent developments in the UK and France in the context of wider debates on immigration and integration policies. Against the background of diminishing sovereignty and the expansion of rights to non-citizens, states are rethinking the significance of citizenship and migration status and the criteria to be applied in determining membership and access to the nation-state. The adoption in France of the Charte des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen Français marks a further step in the expansion of integration conditions imposed by states, and signals a continuing willingness to deploy juridical forms to enforce such conditions. Of particular concern to this Special Issue are the implications of civic integration requirements for migrant religious women and for feminist engagement with migration laws and the discourse of rights.

The conclusion of this study of new laws in the UK ends with a note that ‘Without popular authority, the state will continue to blunder along in its futile, repressive and demoralising pursuit of absolute safety’ (p. 241). This closing line not only informs us of the author's critical approach to many of the new laws in Britain, but more importantly gives a strong indication of the breadth of the book and its attempt to situate the rise of the Insecurity State in the changing political and cultural climate – one that in particular has become essentially preoccupied with ensuring our safety, or as Ramsay would perhaps put it, defending our vulnerable autonomy. As such, this is not just an exceptionally useful and well-informed book about the changing nature of law in the UK, but it is more importantly an attempt to situate these developments in the changing nature of the state – indeed in the changing nature and norms of society, a society within which the ‘right to security’ has come to take precedence.