Religious Marriages in the Mediterranean
Religious Marriages in the Mediterranean Venue and date: Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta, 20-21 March 2018 Within Mediterranean settings, religious marriage has functioned for centuries, together with conversion, as a means both of formal social incorporation and of exclusion of outsiders in relation to religiously-defined officially-recognised ethnic communities. Such an approach was an integral part of the Ottoman constitution; aspects of the millet system continue to have some posthumous existence in states like Lebanon and Cyprus. Over the last century or so, the development of secular or ‘quasi-secular’ nation-states throughout the region has generally meant the replacement of religious by civil marriage within state legal systems. Whether this has occurred via silent absorption or principled exclusion of religious unions, or even by the creation of dualist systems giving civil marriage pride of place, the juridical implications have been profound and range from the c...