ABSTRACT
The legal battle did not stop there, although it took ten years before the Supreme Court ruled in May 2011 that fatwas were not of themselves illegal but could not be used to punish anyone. High-profi le Islamic scholars have accepted the judgment as satisfactory, women’s rights activists are less pleased. While related cases might be brought forward in the future, it seems that, for now, the Bangladeshi legal system has arrived at a momentous decision in dealing with legal pluralism in a modern, Muslim-majority nation-state. In the ten years since the initial ruling, a number of questions have been raised that highlight the tensions between those who want offi cial status for Islamic law in the country and those who believe Islamic law cannot conform to standards for human rights and women’s rights. The cases raise a number of questions related to larger concerns in Bangladesh: What are fatwas? Who should be allowed to give them? And, most important, what is the place of Islamic law within the modern nation-state?
