This study contests the concept of Islamic state and Islamization in Muslim societies particularly Pakistan as a case. It overviews different sources and discusses Islamization in Pakistan; which initiates in 1949 with Objectives Resolution and onward inclusion of Islamic provisions in the 1973 constitution and  General Zia’s formal Islamization of constitution and society in post 1977 military takeover.  The Islamization process in Pakistan is still an incomplete agenda with some hard questions. The study identifies certain challenges in Islamization process in Pakistan such as how relevant is Islamization to various segments to Pakistani society; what does Islamization mean and how is the issue of varying interpretations and modes of interpretations to be resolved; how to apply Islamization to specific issues and policies such as national development, women’s rights, and scientific education; how to evolve a mechanism for Islamic laws to co-exist with local and customary laws; and the duality of certain laws in presence of Islamic law such as Anglo Saxon legal framework in Pakistan introduced ambiguity in its application.

A discussion about individual freedom from an Islamic perspective (in Arabic).

Women’s issues have been conceptualized in the international development context in many forms and trends that have affected in a way or another local policies with this regard. Countries of the Arab world, as all the countries who signed and ratified the UN treaties related to gender and women’s issues, have been affected by this international context trying to comply with what they previously agreed upon. Women in Development (WID) has been the first paradigm that framed and oriented local policies. By WID, women’s issues were made relevant to development by arguing for the positive correlation between investing in women and economic growth.

Using a mixture of WID and GAD, I shall make the case for the importance of promoting economic freedom of women in the Arab world in advancing their status and the general economic growth of their countries. The current paper argues in two directions: first in favor of market friendly policies showing how market opportunities could spur investment in girls’ health and education and hence contribute in changing power structures; and second, in favor of a gender sensitive approach that should accompany the market friendly policies, as much as possible, to reduce the entry barriers that limit women’s agency and prevent them from benefiting from such opportunities.

Souad Adnane is a women’s rights activist in Morocco. She served as a project coordinator for five years in different local and international NGOs. She is currently in charge of coordinating and monitoring a community development program aiming at improving life conditions of vulnerable populations in the MENA region. She is also the Foreign Relations Coordinator of the Arab Center for Scientific Research & Humane Studies.

This presentation is based on journal articles based on World Values Survey Database which is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social ,economic and political life. This study looks into the impact of muslim religiosity on attitudes conducting to free markets. 

Mustapha Radji is an Associate Professor in Sociology of Religion, University of Mostaganem – Algeria.

This paper will argue that in order for secularism to be compatible with freedom, it must be a secularism that draws on the religious traditions and history of its political context. It will examine the competing political narratives of the Arab Spring and compare them with debates on the role of religion in society in Europe, arguing that just as religiously exclusive polities must restrict freedoms to survive, so must secularist polities that deny the role of religion in shaping their culture, and the place of religion in public life. Instead, a secular‐pluralism can acknowledge its history and current religious context, welcoming religiously based political reasoning without excluding the political reasoning of those of different religions or none.

The Muslim Open Society is a concept with traction. It’s a society under the banner of Islam where ideas freely circulate without reprisal or recrimination and where citizens have the right to dissent ( حق الاختلاف ). And it’s not an ideal to hope for but an emergent reality on the ground in many places: Are there signs of the Muslim Open Society in Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Indonesia?

إن المجتمع المدني سواء من حیث المفھوم أو التجارب عرف تطورا عمیقا حیث أصبح معھ
یعتبر من سمات الدولة الحدیثة، والمغرب كغیره من البلدان كان یعرف عددا من التجارب سابقة في
ممارستھا لظھور مفھوم المجتمع المدني، ھذه التجارب التي كانت غالبا ما تتخذ طابعا تضامنیا أو
اجتماعیا؛ فقد عرف المغرب ما قبل الحمایة عددا من ھذه التجارب أما إبان مرحلة الحمایة فقد ظھرت
عدد من التجارب المتقدمة على ھذا المستوى والتي نادت بالاستقلال والتحرر، ھذا التراكم ھو ما جعل
للتجربة المغربة طابعا متفردا أثر فیما بعد ،أي بعد الاستقلال على موقع وواقع المجتمع المدني الذي بدأ
یبحث لنفسھ عن موقع في الحیاة العامة.

An overview of the property right index in Muslim countries.

In this paper, we will use the institutional approach to explain the level of entrepreneurship in Muslim countries. Indeed, the decision to undertake depends on the rules of the game (formal and informal institutions) that frame the entrepreneurial act. We will show that if in the first periods of Islam have flourished entrepreneurship in all its forms, the decline came following the deterioration of the quality of institutions governing Entrepreneurship (rule of law, financing, property rights, innovation, etc.). That is, if the positive spirit of Islam remained favourable to entrepreneurship, at least in the original texts, the practice of entrepreneurship has been discouraged in the field because of the inadequacy of the institutions.

Hicham El Moussaoui is an Assistant Professor of economics at Sultan Moulay Slimane University (Morocco), and Editor of www.libreafrique.org, Francophone project of ATLAS Foundation for Economic Research.

In this paper the main point is to redefine ‘civil religion’ as it is understood from Islamic point of view. This is because civil religion in the structure of Islam makes different sense than it does in Christianity. Within the framework of this paper, civil religion is enforced not by the State but by its believers in personal and nongovernmental sense. Nongovernmental understanding of civil religion is what makes it empowered as liberally as possible. What I would like to put forward as to define “civil religion” is that it should be promoted to bring balance in the structural form of religion of Islam under the influence of the State and to provide its believers with understanding that is built upon nongovernmental formation which has no correlation with the State neither in negative nor positive sense.

Can Ceylan is an Assist.Prof., Istanbul Medipol University, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Political Science and International Relations.