The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale will hold, on December 7-8, 2007, a conference on the question of Muslim citizens in non-Muslim liberal democracies. The conference seeks to address primarily philosophical, ethical and doctrinal issues arising from the dialogue between liberal and Islamic values, beliefs and conceptions of justice, as well as empirical issues related to the beliefs, attitudes and social conditions of actual Muslim communities living in non-Muslim liberal democracies. The conference will bring together some of the top philosophers, political theorists, legal scholars, Islamicists, and social scientists working in areas related to Muslim citizens of America and other liberal democracies.

The questions which this conference seeks to address include the following:

• What, precisely, do liberal conceptions of justice and citizenship demand of Muslims and other religious citizens?
  
  
• What principled value conflicts exist between liberalism and Islamic political and legal ethics?
  
  
• What is the role of non-Muslims in engaging Islamic ethics through a form of comparative ethics or comparative political philosophy? What are the methods and ethics of engaging in such discourses?
  
  
• What philosophical and political issues are raised by the interest in an “overlapping consensus” or the justification of common moral principles from multiple ethical foundations?
  
• What are the possible foundations for Islamic justifications of any of the main terms of liberal citizenship?
  
  
• What can be learned about both liberalism and Islamic ethics from a close study of value conflicts between the two?
  
  
• How should Muslims living in the West approach Islamic sources? What are the main moral and doctrinal concerns facing those Muslim communities?
  
  
• How should Muslims relate Islamic law to life in the West?
  
  
• Is the discourse of fiqh al-aqalliyat a promising avenue for reconciling religious and civic commitments?
  
  
• How do really existing Muslim communities tend to regard the conflict between Islamic and civic commitments? What patterns are discernible within Muslim communities on questions of religiosity and political participation?

For more information, contact Andrew March.