Assist. Prof. Dr. Mona Oraby

Amherst College, USA

Curriculum Vitae

Assist. Prof. Dr. Mona Oraby ist Rechts- und Religionswissenschaftlerin. Sie erforscht insbesondere Prozesse von Gruppenbildung und der Zuschreibung von Gruppenzugehörigkeit. 2017 wurde Mona Oraby an der Northwestern University mit einer Arbeit zum Thema „The Difference that Affiliation Makes: Religious Conversion, Minorities, and the Rule of Law“ promoviert. Anschließend war Mona Oraby Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow am Center for Law, Society, and Culture der Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Derzeit ist sie als Assistant Professor am Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought des Amherst College tätig. Darüber hinaus war sie unter anderem Fellow und Gastdozentin an der American Bar Foundation in Chicago, am Institute for Critical Social Inquiry an der New School in New York sowie am Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften in Göttingen.

Seit 2017 ist Mona Oraby Herausgeberin des digitalen Publikationsforums „The Immanent Frame“ des Social Science Research Council. The Immanent Frame veröffentlicht interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu den Themen Religion, Säkularismus und Öffentlichkeit. Ebenso ist Mona Oraby Mitglied im Redaktionsbeirat der Zeitschrift Arab Law Quarterly und des Middle East Law and Governance Journals. Des Weiteren ist sie Mitglied des Lenkungsausschusses der Programmeinheit Säkularismus und Säkularität der American Academy of Religion.

Von Oktober 2020 bis März 2021 war Assist. Prof. Dr. Mona Oraby Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Recht als Kultur" in Bonn.

Forschungsprojekt

“How Will We Know Who We Are? Devotion to the Administrative State”

Why are those marginalized by the law among its most faithful subjects? What explains their counterintuitive fidelity to regimes of recognition? This book project draws on the case of contemporary Egypt where religion is a compulsory feature of civil status. Religious affiliation determines the scope of one’s public and private rights, and non-affiliation is not an option. My research reveals that over the last three decades of public and judicial debate over status conversion, the right to amend religious affiliation on vital records, non-Muslims routinely seek recognition of their difference rather than advocate for state indifference toward religion. I argue based on administrative jurisprudential trends and observations of legal counsel and their clients for a rethinking of the relationship between inequality and freedom. Contrary to prevailing conceptions within critical legal studies and the anthropology of religion regarding the pernicious effect of secular law on religious life, I show the extent to which self-understanding, national belonging, and communal coherence are indebted to state recognition of one’s inequality in relation to others.

Publikationen (Auswahl)

Mona Oraby and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, “Law and Religion: Reimagining the Entanglement of Two Universals,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 16. (October 2020): 257-276 (PDF)
Mona Oraby, “Law, the State, and Public Order: Regulating Religion in Contemporary Egypt,” Law & Society Review 52, no. 3 (September 2018): 574-602 (PDF)
Mona Oraby, “The Difference That Affiliation Makes: Religious Conversion, Minorities, and the Rule of Law” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2017).
Mona Oraby, “Authorizing Religious Conversion in Administrative Courts: Law, Rights and Secular Indeterminacy,” New Diversities 17, no. 1 (2015): 63-75 (PDF)