Andrew F. March

Is There a Right to Polygamy? Marriage, Equality and Subsidizing Families in Liberal Public Justification

This paper argues that the four most plausible arguments compatible with public reason for an outright legal ban on all forms of polygamy are unvictorious. I consider the types of arguments political liberals would have to insist on, and precisely how strongly, in order for a general prohibition against polygamy to be justified, while also considering what general attitude towards “marriage” and legal recognition of the right to marry is most consistent with political liberalism. I argue that a liberal state should get out of the “marriage business” by leveling down to a universal status of “civil union” neutral as to the gender and affective purpose of domestic partnerships. I then refute what I regard as the four most plausible rational objections to offering this civil union status to multi-member domestic partnerships. The most common objection to polygamy is on grounds of gender equality, more specifically, female equality. But advancing this argument forcefully often involves neglecting the tendency of political liberalism (by whatever name it goes in contemporary, complex, multicultural societies) to tolerate a certain amount of inequality in private, within the bounds of robust and meaningful freedoms of choice and exit. Properly understood, polygamy involves no inherent statement about the essential inferiority of women, and certainly not more than many other existing practices and institutions (including many expressions of the main monotheistic religions) which political liberals regard as tolerable, even reasonable. Arguments from the welfare of children, fairness in the spousal market, and the abuse of family subsidies are also considered and found insufficient for excluding polygamy.

Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims

This paper critiques some contemporary accounts of which forms of Muslim religiosity are at stake in conflicts over blasphemy, and asks whether the problem of offensive and injurious speech contributes to a critique of secularism.

Speech and the Sacred: Does the Defense of Free Speech Rest on a Mistake about Religion?

Some scholars have argued that religiously injurious speech poses a serious problem for secular liberal thought. It has been suggested that secular liberal thought and political practice often misrecognize the nature of the injury involved in speech that violates the sacred and that much secular thought about religious injury (and free exercise more generally) is premised on unacknowledged Protestant conceptions of what real religion is. In this essay, I argue against the ideas that secular liberalism tends to treat religion only as a matter of freely chosen belief and that the unchosen, habituated nature of much religious experience raises a problem for the defense of speech that violates the sacred. I argue that secular thought and practice should remain very concerned about the social and political harms of speech directed unambiguously at social groups but need not eliminate the gap between religious attachments and religious persons.

Law as a Vanishing Mediator in the Theological Ethics of Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan’s recent book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, boldly proclaims the need for Muslims to completely rethink the very meaning of Islamic law, traditionally the preeminent Islamic normative discourse and a primary distinguishing feature of Islam from other religions, replacing it with a more ecumenical applied ethics. He begins the book by rejecting the moderate reformist methods adopted in his previous books as insufficient for the ‘radical reform’ of their epistemologies and mentalities which he believes contemporary Muslims must undertake. It is tempting, therefore, to see this work as a radical break with Law. In this article, I offer a different interpretation. On my reading, throughout his previous works Ramadan systematically advanced and elevated a certain interpretation of Law, based on an appropriation of certain concepts taken from mainstream Islamic legal theory and crucial to the efforts of all reformist thinkers. It is these concepts, which he retains but completely recasts, which mediate his move to a post-legal Islamic ethics. I argue that Ramadan’s long-term project neither merely abandons Islamic law, nor merely reforms it, but dissolves the framework of Law through its own devices.

What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us About Secular Modernity

Review of Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

On the Will to Be Disciplined: Response to Jenco

In her challenging and ambitious article, “Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of ‘Chinese Origins for Western Knowledge,’ 1860–1895,”1 Leigh Jenco “seek[s] to demonstrate not only that, but also how, political theorists might come to be disciplined by the standards of a differently sited conversation” (660), namely, by knowledge perceived as culturally and civilizationally other. In her essay, she mobilizes two primary distinctions—between historical and cultural otherness, and between knowledge that disciplines and knowledge that is assimilated—in order to make a striking claim, namely, that by “situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our past [we will] be able to reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry.” The key here is “situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our [own] past.” Like nineteenth-century Chinese reformers confronted with Western science who sought to attribute misty Chinese origins for it, Jenco thinks that the way to give non-Western thought its due—that is, its status as potentially disciplinary knowledge—is to ascribe to it origins in our own “Western” intellectual genealogy. There are three primary questions that present themselves. First, has political theory in fact deprived itself of potentially fruitful innovations and advances by refusing to take on thought from outside a Western horizon and accord it a “disciplinary” role, that is, as a potential source of innovation rather than something to be assimilated? Second, if this self-deprivation is due to a xenophobic unwillingness to treat external others the way we treat

Anwar Al-'Awlaqi Against the Islamic Legal Tradition

The question of citizenship within a non-Muslim polity intersects a series of core issues of Islamic political ethics. Non-Muslim states are by definition those states that are not governed in accordance with God’s revealed Law; their justice is thus suspect. They are by definition those states that do not accord a privileged status to God’s true religion and do not provide it with its due protections; their legitimacy is thus suspect. Non-Muslim societies are by definition united around goals and interests that are un-Islamic; solidarity with them is thus suspect. Non-Muslim states might find themselves at war with Muslim ones or pursue their aims at the expense of Muslims; loyalty to them is thus suspect.