The Difference That Affiliation Makes: Religious Conversion, Minorities, and the Rule of Law

States today are inaugurating or refining complex administrative systems intended to assuage the challenges of social pluralism. Using modern Egypt as a case study of a global phenomenon, the dissertation examines legal conflicts over the right to change religion or belief that arise from constitutional commitments to religious freedom, Islamic law, and legal equality. It undertakes a historical inquiry into how religious affiliation became a legal category whose amendment is subject to ecclesiastical certification, bureaucratic approval, and administrative judicial oversight. By analyzing previously untapped administrative jurisprudence on conversion, the study further illuminates the role that institutions of liberal legality play in shaping interreligious relations over time. In order to account for the lived effects of state regulation, the dissertation relies on participant observation and interviews with converts who migrate between or exceed state-authorized categories of religious affiliation, as well as with their legal representatives. The research provides original insight into how and why social practices that previously existed outside the scope of state regulation are increasingly circumscribed under the rule of law. It further shows how state involvement in complex cases of religious identity and familial rights generates unresolvable paradoxes, as an unruly social world is forced into sharply defined categories of legal standing and communal belonging.