Prof. Menchik Publishes on Islamic Law and Birth Control
Assistant Professor Jeremy Menchik‘s research paper on why the world’s largest Islamic organizations radically changed their interpretations of Islamic law in favor of increased access to birth control and what that evolution suggests about the relationship between religion and secularism was recently published in the South East Asia Research journal.
In the paper titled “The Co-evolution of Sacred and Secular: Islamic Law and Family Planning in Indonesia,” Prof. Menchik, who teaching politics and religion at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston Univeristy, posits that “while scholars of the Islamic revival have devoted attention to the increased prominence of Islamic law [the shari’a] in the once-secular public sphere, less attention has been paid to a countervailing trend.
By mapping the evolution of Islamic law over the twentieth century, the author demonstrates that the shari’a is a product of decades of negotiations between Islamic institutions and more secular authorities including government ministers, doctors and social movements. This evolution suggests that secular authority and secular forms of knowledge have influenced but not displaced religious authority and religious forms of knowledge. The opposite is also true.
This finding raises questions about the binary distinction between secular and sacred authority and suggests the co-evolution of religious and secularism in modern Muslim societies.”
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