At the broadest level, conceptions of the Islamic Republic’s political legitimacy are guided by one of three assumptions. The first assumption is that legitimacy is divinely bestowed, with the velayat-e faqih installed by God as someone who has the wisdom necessary to guide his people. There is no need for popular vote for the system to become legitimate, although there is no harm in it either. This popular vote is valid only when it has the leader’s approval. A second perspective assumes that God has given people the right and the ability to determine their own destiny and their affairs. Therefore, according to the shari‘ah, legitimacy rests with the people. A third outlook bridges these two perspectives, maintaining that while legitimacy is exclusively divine in genesis, it is practically irrelevant without acceptability, which makes the system functional when people participate in it. Legitimacy comes only from God, while it is the people who give the system the acceptance it needs by deciding what is in their interests. Moreover, acceptance has the added benefit of drawing people closer to the political system.

Disagreements over a religion’s interpretation can cause a schism – a formal division into variants with their own officials, doctrines, and rituals. Islam’s Sunni–Shii split over succession disputes came early in its history. One might expect either Muslim modernizers or liberal Muslims to have split Islam further. They have done so only informally, in that the global Muslim community is divided between practicing and nominal Muslims. But nowhere in the Middle East is discontent lacking among practicing Muslims over state-approved interpretations. This is evident in the popularity of unregulated fatwa services. Substantial constituencies consider rituals outdated, clerics unprincipled, and gender discrimination unacceptable. But widespread discontent within a religious community need not generate a disunion. If the risk of joining the leavers is grave enough, disaffected members will stick with the status quo. A successful schism requires, at some stage, open collective action on the part of a constituency with a shared religious vision, possibly under leaders able to strategize, represent the membership, and coordinate moves. Also necessary is that supporters of the religious status quo lack the organizational capacity to erect roadblocks. At present, any group trying to develop an alternative to Sunnism or Shiism would face major resistance.

Rushdie’s autobiographical writing has detailed his early career, his life in hiding during the fatwa after 1989, and his re-emergence into public life since 1998. Joseph Anton requires particular attention not only because of its narrative voice in the third person but also because of its appropriation of both biographical and fictional devices in an attempt to tell ‘as much truth as possible’ about his private self, Salman, who is masked under the public image of Rushdie. Reading Joseph Anton alongside other notable biographical works on Rushdie, namely J. Weatherby’s Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death, Steven Grandison’s The Satanic Verses 30 Years On, and BBC Imagine’s semi-biographical documentary Fatwa: Salman’s Story, this chapter sheds light on the complex interplay of fiction, fact, ‘truth’, and the literary constructions of self, society, and the world in Rushdie’s work.

This chapter considers the wider implications of The Satanic Verses affair and the fatwa. It engages with Rushdie’s considerations of Islam, secularism, and the complexities of geopolitical leadership of the Muslim world. The chapter also explores the wider questions and implications of freedom of expression that have been raised in Europe especially at the time and structured Britain’s relationship with Iran between 1989 and 1998. The chapter examines Rushdie’s own responses to the fatwa, collected in the final sections in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands as well as considering responses from Muslim literary critics and writers, some of whom supported Rushdie, others who spoke out against him, to illuminate the wider public debates around freedom of expression, secularism, and faith, which have proved central to a consideration of Rushdie’s work.

In 1979, the nation of Iran underwent an intellectual-cultural-religious-political revolution integrating Islamic law/principles into Iranian healthcare legislation and healthcare delivery. In this chapter, we investigate the domain of patient autonomy in Islamic law and scrutinise Iranian statute law and by-laws, including the Patient Rights Charter (2009). We conclude that advance directives in Iran, at most, function to advise the patient’s legal surrogate decision maker provided they are in keeping with the law. Despite this, advance directives are significantly underutilised in Iranian healthcare. This may be influenced by a lack of legislation clarifying the status of physician liability for respecting advance directives to refuse life-sustaining treatment, controversy in Islamic legal circles over personal autonomy, pressure from relatives to continue futile care, cultural beliefs around divine fate/suffering and a lack of palliative care services. In order to utilise the potential for advance directives to improve the delivery of appropriate healthcare in end-of-life patients, a clear fatwa is required on the matter, followed by clear legislation clarifying patient rights to refuse treatment and physician liability. Hospital and community healthcare services must also be empowered to implement advance directives and improve delivery of palliative care where indicated.

Making sense of advance directives, and the regulatory frameworks governing healthcare more generally, in Saudi Arabia requires a careful understanding of the traditional Islamic religious legal framework of Shari’ah. There is much uncertainty about how to interpret Islamic legal principles in making use of advance directives and in providing end-of-life care in Saudi Arabia. In this chapter, we aim to offer clarity on how well-established principles, and Islamic statements of permissible and impermissible behaviour, should be reasoned through to provide an underpinning governance framework for healthcare practices at the end of life. We also review published evidence on the practical application of advance directives in Saudi Arabia and examine the social and cultural factors that may explain the limited uptake of advance directives, We conclude with two suggestions for establishing an appropriate role for advance directives in future – one concerning the need for legal clarity and the other concerning how to bring about improvements in professional knowledge and understanding.

This chapter focuses on legal entanglements between international, state and non-state law in postcolonial societies. While undoubtedly a very heterogeneous category that unavoidably escapes reductionist attempts at homogenisation, it argues that those places where colonial powers institutionalized plural legal orders as explicit strategies for the consolidation of their rule constitute a privileged site for the investigation of entangled legalities. This chapter analyses such entanglements by focusing on the dialectic dynamics of approximation and distancing, which unfold between different sets of norms. It identifies three ways in which these dynamics can play out: denial, deferral and translation. The empirical backdrop of this chapter are three vignettes, which illustrate different dynamics of entanglement between international, state and non-state law in contemporary Bangladesh: (1) the Supreme Court’s attempt to ban Islamic fatwas in 2001 (denial); (2) the violent protests this has triggered and the subsequent decision of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court to stay the verdict for over a decade (deferral); and (3) the work of local activists who, regardless of constitutional developments, seek to carve out emancipatory spaces for marginalized people by simultaneously drawing on multiple normative registers, including Islamic and international human rights norms (translation).

The chapter presents the religious guidance and moral support (irşad in Turkish) that the Diyanet preachers provide to women and families. In line with a redefinition of religious services as a pastoral care designed to enlighten the believer on any aspects of life, the irşad’s activities have been deeply reshaped. This has occurred through old and new institutions that have been put in place. The chapter refers to the fatwa services provided in local mufti offices, as a phone service and via online platform, and to the Family Guidance and Consultation Bureaus established in 2002 with the aim to provide religious counseling to women and families. It also emphasizes how religious officers’ activities are conducted outside the mosques, in prisons, hospitals, orphanages, and women’s shelters. The expansion of the Diyanet’s moral mission is thus characterized by a pervasive moral support that goes beyond the mosques to penetrate and reshape the spaces of the secular.