Activities
Past events
Internal view and positioning of religion in relation to secular/political power
Interdisciplinary workshop on Monday, November 6, 2023
This year's workshop of the Forum for the Comparison of the Legal Traditions of Religions (= RdR Forum) at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien focuses on the question of the relationship between the religious sphere and the secular and political sphere from the (internal) perspective of the respective religious discourse bearers, namely the Jewish, Islamic and Christian legal traditions.
In states where there is no strict separation between state and religion, this issue is of particular relevance. However, it is not the religious constitutional law of specific countries that is to be addressed, but the basic theoretical self-understanding regarding the relationship structure between the religious and the secular in the respective religion, or specific traditions and how these are to be inferred from the classical sources that explicitly or implicitly touch on this question.
Does the respective religious tradition recognize the secular and power-political authority? How is this recognition then expressed? Does the secular and political sphere lie beyond the boundaries of religious worldview, belief and action, so that only marginal reference is made to it in religious discourse? Can we speak of a separation of powers, and if so, what does this look like in each case?
Does the secular itself, including the non-political secular, have a place in the respective religious worldview, or must secular content become quasi-religious in order to become part of religion?
Dealing with alterity in religious traditions
Interdisciplinary workshop on Monday, July 11, 2022
The aim of this year's workshop is to take a comparative look at how each tradition views those of other faiths and the otherness of those who do not belong to their own tradition. As is well known, the historical encounter with the other, the foreigner, has essentially shaped the identity of the respective religious traditions. The formation of one's own identity goes hand in hand with the formation of normative strategies for encountering the other, evaluating the other, distinguishing oneself from the other and defining the limits of tolerance. This theologically and ethically influenced normativity is formed in legal definitions. What is the legal basis for dealing with the Other in each case? What perspective is adopted in order to reflect on others? Is the perspective, for example, political, namely the view of non-members as a minority in the majority collective of their own tradition (for example in the Jewish, Christian or Muslim state or the Jewish, Christian or Muslim community)? Are there other points of view? Is the demarcation from secular society different from that of people of other faiths? What categories and terms are used in legal terms? What distinctions apply to others? Are temporal or political distinctions relevant? In which areas of life are the legal structures relevant in the current discourse of the respective religions? What social relevance do the legal aspects have in the behavior of others? Do they reinforce negative religious othering or can they be used as resources for peace-oriented coexistence?
Lecture series: COMPARING THE LAW OF RELIGIONS: DIFFERENT APPROACHES AND METHODS
Religions have different dimensions, such as doctrines, holy scriptures, rites, ethical rules, but often also their own law. For example, there is Jewish and Islamic law as well as various Christian church laws. The academic discipline dedicated to the comparison of such religious legal traditions is relatively young. This interdisciplinary, interreligious and international lecture series explores the question of which approaches and methods already exist and how they could be further developed.
Determination of legal sources in religious legal discourses
In fact, law does not exist without a source from which it claims to originate. This source can be a book, nature ("natural law" as a concept), reason, divine revelation, God, man, legal scholarship, custom, the state, and so on. However, each of these variables is understood very differently in the various religious traditions and their basic languages
for example, can be subdivided internally: The Geonim, leaders of the rabbinical academies, argued with the Karaites in the 10th century as to whether or not qiyas (analogical reasoning) was permissible as a delimited area within reasoning for determining law. According to the Quran, Hadith and consensus(Ijmaa), the Qiyas has a decisive function in the legal discourse in Islamic legal sources. It is evident that "reason" is not recognized en bloc in a supposedly self-evident overall form or not. In the Catholic context, on the other hand, "reason" is often spoken of en bloc, so to speak. The distinction between natural law and law given by God as revelation, on the other hand, is fundamental in Catholic canon law; in Jewish discourse, however, both sources of law may be present, they are just labeled and distinguished differently, or the distinction is not found at all. What sources of law "exist" and how their definition and hierarchy are justified in the jurisprudential discourse are therefore questions that must be tackled at the same time in order to enter into a comparison.
In particular, the question of implicit or explicit legal sources connects religious legal discourses with non-religious and non-legal (e.g. speculative-theological or anthropological) discourses. Therefore, a listing and ordering of the legal sources of a legal tradition is necessarily followed by "work on the concept": What does the conceptual history of the basic language (e.g. Latin, Arabic, Hebrew) imply, what about the translation?
The mere use of an approximate equivalent often obscures precisely what the comparison would be able to highlight. What distinctions (e.g. reason from revelation) may be implicitly assumed, what distinction is surprisingly not made or made differently?
The functionalist approach, which looks at what is meant and the purpose of a source of law, is supplemented by the genealogical question of how a source of law attained the dignity of a source of law: Was it, historically or according to its self-understanding, "used" by an (individual or collective) authority, and what kind of authority? Did it happen in a controlled process, or did it "emerge" and merely remain to be described? What role did the specific doctrine of legal sources play between these poles: did it have an initiating or descriptive function? This question is distinct from that of a legislative body, which normally claims legal sources and is itself committed to them, but does not at the same time and at the same level "enact" them as such.
In addition to the most complete possible systematic-hierarchical listing of legal sources, there is also a direct focus on the theology and anthropology implicit or explicit in the legal discourse. We expect the work on this path into the "still relatively young academic discipline" (Burkhard Berkmann) of the comparison of religious law to provide further insights for the clarification and sharpening of the Forum's task.
With this in mind, the collegial discussion, which until now could only be conducted in depth to a limited extent, was also structurally strengthened in the program for this workshop.
Interdisciplinary workshop on the forms and discursive location of answers in religious legal discourses
Thursday, 11.05.2017, at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
WEBER and KELSEN considered immutability to be a characteristic of religious law. This thesis seems easy to understand, given that religious law is based on a divine origin and stems from sources found in ancient and canonized sacred texts. But if religious law were really not adaptable, would it have lived through so many phases of human history and been able to show people the way in so many different situations?
The planned workshop is about the flexibility of religious rights. Both Jewish and Islamic law as well as canon law are confronted with this question. Is this a question that is only posed to religious rights from the outside, i.e. by people who do not belong to the respective legal community but expect flexibility from it? Or is flexibility intrinsic to the systems themselves and a potential inherent in them? Depending on whether flexibility is located more in the area of hermeneutic means of interpretation or legal policy calculation, a tension may arise.
Furthermore, the effects of flexibilization in religious rights must be considered. There seems to be an expectation that flexibility should lead to a mitigation or even liberalization, but can flexibility in some cases also lead to a tightening? Is flexibilization limited to the application of the law in specific situations so that the legal norm itself remains untouched? Or can it even lead to a permanent further development of the law?
An important approach will be to present individual instruments for flexibility in religious rights. One important area of application of such instruments is likely to be marriage and family law. Examples would be the renunciation of polygamy in Judaism, the application of "oikonomia" in the case of remarriage in Orthodox canon law or the newly accentuated understanding of law that appears in Pope Francis' letter on love in the family (Amoris laetitia). In Islamic law, the question of flexibility arises today particularly with regard to Muslims living in the diaspora. How far can adaptation go when it comes to the law of a minority?
Depending on what kind of legal sources are at the center of a religious legal system, the instruments of flexibility could have different meanings, for example if they serve to break up overly rigid statutory law or if they are considered in connection with Talmudic law, which is already strongly dialectical and case-specific from the outset. Thus, instruments of flexibility must also be seen in the tension between legal certainty and justice in individual cases.
The workshop is structured in such a way that individual religious laws will be discussed one after the other. Methodological approaches to flexibility will be presented from the respective internal perspective, and the similarities and differences that emerge will be compared in the final part. The head of this synthesis section has the task of bringing the individual religious rights into conversation with each other in such a way that a comparison of law in the true sense of the word is achieved.
Program
10:00 a.m. Welcome and opening
10:15 a.m. Judaism:
Prof. Dr. Ronen Reichman, Heidelberg:
Aspects of the development of law in the Halacha
11:00 a.m. Islam:
Prof. Dr. Serdar Kurnaz, Hamburg:
Three models for resolving the tension between tradition and innovation in Islamic law
11:45 a.m. Break
12:00 p.m. Dr. Dr. Anargyros Anapliotis, Munich:
Flexibilization Mechanisms in Orthodox Canon Law: Oikonomia and its Limits
12:45 p.m. Lunch together (university canteen)
13:45 Christianity:
Prof. Dr. Dr. Helmuth Pree, Munich
Flexibilization instruments in Catholic canon law
14:30 hrs Coffee break
14:45 Comparative law discussion with keynote speech by Prof. Dr. Dr. Burkhard Berkmann
4:30 p.m. Arrangements for further planning, conclusion (approx. 5 p.m.)
Please register your attendance: ronen.reichman(at)hfjs.eu or: josef.bamberger(at)hfjs.uni-heidelberg.de
Interdisciplinary workshop on the forms and discursive location of answers in religious legal discourses
Friday, 15.07.2016, at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
The answers given by experts in religious law have different meanings in religious legal discourses. In contrast to or as part of jurisprudence and academic legal discourses, legal opinions, for example, have a special status. They can be an authoritative, established and recognized form of legal instruction to persons and institutions, and sometimes become part of the applicable law.
Particularly in the context of legal practice, the opinion of the legal scholar, who gives a reasoned opinion on a specific case or question, develops a binding relevance. In halacha, shariah and ecclesiastical law, the she'elot uTeshuvut, fatwas, responses (as a technical term), expert opinions and expert answers enrich the literature and discourse of the respective legal tradition immensely. By focusing on the questions posed by individual legal cases, the normative knowledge generated by them enlivens the legal discourse in a real-life way.
A (historical-systematic) comparative legal perspective can contribute to deepening the level of reflection on the general question of the significance of the "answers" in the respective legal system by opening up the common structures and specific differences in the religious legal traditions.
Questions that we want to discuss together at the conference include the following:
- Who responds to whom and when?
- How "standardized" is the procedure?
- How "standardized" are the answers? - How binding are the answers, theoretically and practically?
- What are the power mechanisms on which the effect of the legal opinions is based?
- Is (and how is) the process of asking and answering questions linked to the development of the law? - i.e. does the legal information provided in the responses find its way into "codified law"?
- Historical developments: Was it historically different than it is today?
- Are there particular developments in the use of responses?
- Which forms of argumentation are used? How is the reasoning process structured?
- What role do political or social aspects play in the responses?
- Are such considerations explicit in the responsum?
- Do theological aspects also come into play?
Program
10:00 a.m. Welcome and opening Ass. iur. Doris Forster, Konstanz:
Historical comparative law and comparative legal history - on the method of comparative law in legal history
10:30 a.m. Judaism: Dr. Vladislav (Zeev) Slepoy, Heidelberg: On the form and function of rabbinic responses
Discussion
11:30 a.m. Short break
11:40 a.m. Christianity: Dr. Franz Kalde, Paderborn: Responsa in canon law. Origin - Form - Legal Character
12:30 p.m. Lunch together (university canteen)
13:30 Prof. Dr. Anargyros Anapliotis, Munich: The Greek-Orth. Canon Law in Comparison
Discussion
14:15 Islam: Prof. Dr. Mohammed Nekroumi, Erlangen: On the relationship between fatwa and the derivation of norms using the example of the prohibition of fornication in the Koran
Discussion
15:00 hrs Coffee break
15:15 Dr. Hakki Arslan, Osnabrück: Fatwa issuing in the past and present
Discussion
16:00 Overall comparison and discussion of the methods of comparison
16:30 Arrangements for further planning, conclusion (approx. 17:00)
Please register your attendance: ronen.reichman@hfjs.eu
Interdisciplinary workshop
on conceptions and implications of natural law elements of religious legal discourses
Thursday, 12.11.2015, at the University of Jewish Studies
The idea of natural law has experienced various renaissances in the recent past. On the other hand, it is viewed critically. Although the concept originated within Christianity, it draws on common roots and exchanges with Judaism and Islam, and from the perspective of the historical tradition of ideas, natural law is an interreligious area of overlap par excellence.
The question can be raised as to whether, in addition to the "assumed" common ground, there is also an opposing common ground between the religions, which gathers on the side of those who criticize nature as a standard-setter. This appears to be the case.
Does the broad spectrum of common ground lead to a similar relationship with the natural law tradition? Is the discourse on natural law introduced under this name conducted in the various traditions, including Judaism and Islam? Is there (and in what relation to "revelation" is there) a concept analogous or similar to the concept of nature in the non-Latin discourse traditions, and, following on from this, is a - possibly quite differently named - similar or different discourse of the normativity of this "nature" associated with it? What is the significance of differences between denominations within the traditions?
And a similar question exists with regard to the concept of "natural reason". There are already established translation proposals for this term based on the historical conception of "natural reason" in the confrontation between Christian and Jewish and Arabic philosophy.
In addition to the scientifically challenging concern, the social ambivalence of the topic to the present day is a motive for developing a differentiated view.