- Shamshad Pasarlay discusses the Afghan Shīʿī communities’ position on the idea of constitutionalism and their vision for a modern constitutional state in “Shīʿī Constitutionalism in Afghanistan: A Tale of Two Draft Constitutions”, Islamic Law & Law of the Muslim World (originally published in the Australian Journal of Asian Law). Drawing on two draft constitutions that Afghanistan’s most prominent Shīʿī Islamist parties published in the 1990s, the author argues that the Afghan Shīʿī parties’ image of constitutionalism exemplifies two different (and opposing) schools of legal and political thought in Shīʽīsm.
- In “Writing Law at the Edge of Empire: Evidence from the Qazis of Bharuch (1799–1864),” Itinerario, Elizabeth Lhost highlights the particularities of local legal practice, captured in the writings of qazis (Islamic judges) like Sayyid Ahmad Husain of Bharuch, and the material mechanisms by which the British East India Company co-opted existing documentary cultures, such as the production and authentication of certain types of legal documents to extend state surveillance over local populations.
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Mahmoud Jaraba argues that the absence of a recognized Islamic judicial authority in Germany has led Muslim communities to come up with “local experts”, who purport to implement elements of sharīʿah through informal mediation and arbitration in “Khul‘ in Action: How Do Local Muslim Communities in Germany Dissolve an Islamic Religious-Only Marriage?”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.