A STEP TOO FAR? THE JOURNEY FROM "BIOLOGICAL" TO "SOCIETAL" FILIATION IN THE CHILD'S RIGHT TO NAME AND IDENTITY IN ISLAMIC AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

This socio-legal narrative investigates the journey from "biological" to "societal" filiation undertaken by Islamic and international law regimes in their endeavors to ensure a child's right to name and identity. Combining a discussion of filiation—a status-assigning process...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ali, Shaheen Sardar 1955- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press [2019]
In: Journal of law and religion
Year: 2019, Volume: 34, Issue: 3, Pages: 383-407
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Islamic law / Abstammungsrecht / Child / Human rights / Social identity
IxTheo Classification:AD Sociology of religion; religious policy
BJ Islam
XA Law
Further subjects:B Muslim state practice
B Children's rights convention
B Islamic Law
B Filiation
B child rights
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Summary:This socio-legal narrative investigates the journey from "biological" to "societal" filiation undertaken by Islamic and international law regimes in their endeavors to ensure a child's right to name and identity. Combining a discussion of filiation—a status-assigning process—with adoption and kafāla (fostering) as status-transferring mechanisms, it highlights a nuanced hierarchy relating to these processes within Muslim communities and Muslim state practices. It questions whether evolving conceptions of a child's rights to name and identity represent a paradigm shift from "no status" if born out of wedlock toward "full status" offered through national and international law and Muslim state and community practices. The article challenges the dominant (formal, legal) position within the Islamic legal traditions that nasab (filiation) is obtainable through marriage alone. Highlighting inherent plurality within the Islamic legal traditions, it demonstrates how Muslim state practice and actual practices of Muslim communities on the subject are neither uniform nor necessarily in accordance with stated doctrinal positions of the juristic schools to which they subscribe. Simultaneously, the paper challenges some exaggerated gaps between "Islamic" and "Western" conceptions of children's rights, arguing that child-centric resources in Islamic law tend to be suppressed by a "universalist" Western human-rights discourse. Tracing common threads through discourses within both legal traditions aimed at ensuring children a name and identity, it demonstrates that the rights values in the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child resonate with preexisting values within the Islamic legal traditions.
ISSN:2163-3088
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/jlr.2019.44