Political science Islamic law
Political science Islamic law
All sources must be stated properly please make sure most of the sources are from course book
• Rules for the Exam Period:
o This is a STRICTLY SOLITARY EXERCISE. You may not speak to any
classmates about the exam content or your answers until the submission deadline has
passed.
o The rules regarding cheating and plagiarism for this exam are exactly as they would
be for an in-class sit-down exam. This means that your writing must be yours alone,
and any direct quotes or ideas borrowed from someone else must be properly
attributed to that author.
o Suspicions of plagiarism will be investigated according to departmental regulation
and, if needed, disciplinary action will follow University policy (for more
information, see Concordia’s Academic Integrity guidelines:
https://www.concordia.ca/students/academic-integrity.html).
• How to Answer the Exam Questions:
o When you turn to the next page, you will find three essay prompt questions. You
must chose and provide answers to only TWO of these questions.
o Formatting: Craft your responses in the form of well-structured and substantiated
essays.
§ Each of your answers should be double spaced and 4-5 pages in length.
§ You should use a 12-point serif font (like Cambria or Times New Roman).
Margins should be 2.5cm wide.
o Citation style: You may use either Chicago style (ie. footnotes) or MLA/APA style
(ie. in-text) for your citations. If you use the MLA/APA citation style, you must
provide a bibliography.
o This exam is open-book. This means that you will be expected to refer to course
material in answering the exam questions. Above all, you should refer to readings and
lectures, but you may also refer to materials you used during research for either of
your papers. There is no minimum or maximum number of sources you may cite, but
of course, a wide use of and sophisticated engagement with the course material will
result in a higher grade.
o Evaluation criteria: You will be graded on clarity of writing; persuasiveness of
argument (ie. making a claim and substantiating it); structure and organization of the
essay; and proper attribution and use of a recognized citation style.
Choose only TWO of these three questions and answer them in essay format. Submit both
answers in one .doc file to the Moodle assignment submission page. Your submission must
include your name, student number, and course code.
Option 1: Imagine three different women, each of whom is trying to obtain a divorce from her
husband. The first is a woman from a poor family living in an Anatolian province of the Ottoman
Empire in the sixteenth century. The second is an Algerian woman living in nineteenth-century
Algiers, then under French-colonial rule, who wants to divorce her husband on the grounds of his
impotence. The third is a Swahili woman in Kenya today, who claims that her husband is
abusive. How would these three women’s experiences in the courtroom vary? In what ways
would they be similar? What do these differences tell us about transformations in Islamic law
over time and in relation to different social and political contexts? And what do their experiences
tell us about gender orders and women’s negotiation with different legal actors and institutions?
Option 2: What is “legal pluralism”? How have polities differed in their management of
religious and legal difference? What is the relationship between Islamic law and legal pluralism?
And how has this relationship changed over time and space? In writing your answer to this
question, you should provide specific examples from the various historical and contemporary
contexts we have studied in this class. Consider the operation of legal pluralism in the Ottoman
Empire, in various semi-colonial and colonial contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and in postcolonial contexts today that include both Muslim-majority and Western-liberal states,
such as Canada.
Option 3: In the last class of the term, we discussed the question, put by University of Toronto
legal scholar, Mohammad Fadel: “Can Islamic law and secular politics co-exist?” In some ways,
this is the latest iteration of a question that Muslims have been asking since the late-eighteenth
century. Another way to put this question is: How should Islamic law relate to modern life and
the modern state? In your response to this question, consider how different actors have
responded to this challenge, from pro-ijtihad reformers like Muhammad Abduh and Jamal ad-
Din al-Afghani, to Westernizing secularists like Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, to modern Salafists
like the Muslim Brotherhood, to Islamic feminists like Kecia Ali and Amina Wadud, and finally
to contemporary scholars like Fadel and Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na`im. Your answer should: lay
out their respective positions in relation to this question, map their relation to each other, and
finally offer some of your own reflections in light of your study of their various positions.
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