Aims of the Project

MINARET aims to advance understanding of how law, religion, and governance interact in post-imperial Muslim-majority societies. The project focuses on how Islamic legal cultures, constitutional traditions, and governance practices shape public authority, state legitimacy, legal reform, and debates on democratization and good governance.

The project has four main aims:

First, MINARET seeks to generate new empirical and theoretical knowledge about the relationship between law, religion, and governance in societies shaped by imperial histories. By collecting original empirical data, the project will contribute to debates in sociology of law, Islamic studies, governance studies, comparative political regimes, development studies, and decolonial scholarship.

Second, the project aims to examine how Islamic values and religious dispositions influence the acceptance, interpretation, and everyday functioning of constitutional law. MINARET investigates how these values affect citizens’ perceptions of government, legal institutions, public authority, and broader governance arrangements.

Third, MINARET aims to train a new generation of scholars with the interdisciplinary, comparative, and methodological skills needed to study post-imperial Islamic legal cultures. The project places doctoral training at its centre, combining academic research, international collaboration, fieldwork, workshops, and engagement with non-academic environments.

Fourth, the project seeks to translate research findings into policy-relevant insights. Through conferences, workshops, publications, policy papers, and public engagement, MINARET aims to contribute to discussions on constitutional development, rule of law, democratic governance, and institutional trust in Muslim-majority societies.

Together, these aims position MINARET as a comparative and interdisciplinary project that moves beyond Western-centric models of law and governance. It seeks to understand legal and political change on its own terms, paying close attention to local histories, religious traditions, imperial legacies, and contemporary reform processes.