In a theocracy...
government enforces religious rules.
Iran closes eateries for violating Ramadan ban"Iran has shut down more than 200 eateries and warned 26,000 people for violating a ban on eating and offering food before sunset during Ramadan, Iran's deputy police chief was quoted as saying...
"[D]uring the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are required to abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and having sex from dawn to dusk..."
Labels: Iran, regime, rule-of-law
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:55 AM
2 Comments:
If one is going to use this in a classroom, it might be good to get students to meditate on the way religious or religiously-derived rules are enforced in other, apparently non-'theocratic' contexts. Alcohol licensing laws and others that have different rules for Sundays, for example. Abortion laws. Are the label 'theocracy' and its presumed binary partner 'secular state' what we want students to learn, or rather that there is a continuum along which governments sit in their choices about applying rules of religious derivation. Did the UK's Sunday Trading laws make it a theocracy? Is a Muslim-majority state that doesn't enforce compliance with Ramadan necessarily secular? Is France a theocracy because some of its national holidays fall on Catholic holidays? Could be an interesting debate...
Ed Webb's ideas for an analysis and discussion are great. This would be a terrific comparative lesson. How much enforcement of religious "rules" is necessary to label a regime theocratic?
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