In Preaching Pious Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi’s Political Thought (Edinburgh University Press), Han Hsien Liew (Arizona State University) “studies the relationship between political thought, preaching and emotions through the writings of Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201), a celebrated hortatory preacher in late Abbasid Baghdad. Through an intertextual analysis of Ibn al-Jawzi’s works in various genres, this book details how his ideal form of rulership reflected the emotional norms and pietistic moral virtues promoted in Muslim hortatory sermons. It also examines the emotional strategies deployed in his efforts to reform the rulers of his time. In highlighting the importance of piety in Ibn al-Jawzi’s political discourses, the book points to a new reading of the history of Islamic political thought that, rather than foregrounding order and military prowess, considers competing political languages among medieval Muslim intellectuals. In doing so, it calls for the need to rethink notions of ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ when studying Islam.”
In “Literal Meaning and Oaths in Medieval Islamic Legal Thought” (MIDÉO), Robert Gleave (University of Exeter) explores the “ways in which notions of literal meaning intersect with Islamic legal literature…by drawing examples from a single work of Muslim jurisprudence (the Kitāb al-ḫilāf of Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, d. 460/1067) and a specific area of Islamic law (from the subsection Kitāb al-aymān—the law regarding oaths and vows). In some ways, any work of classical Muslim jurisprudence and any area of Islamic law could have been selected for these purposes. al-Ṭūsī ’s work, though, is a convenient choice because the author compares the different ways in which language and law interact across the various schools. The legal discussion around oaths, as we shall see, involves a number of linguistic issues in which the role the literal meaning plays can be highlighted.”
