By Athina Pfeiffer Professor Marina Rustow's note: "Having been asked twice now to contribute to the ILB, I’ve been making my way into the corpus of Islamic notarial documents preserved in Cairo Geniza. In the hope of understanding them better, I taught a PhD seminar on them in Fall 2022. Two of my students, Amel … Continue reading Documents of Sale as Living Objects
By Amel Bensalim Professor Marina Rustow's note: "Having been asked twice now to contribute to the ILB, I’ve been making my way into the corpus of Islamic notarial documents preserved in Cairo Geniza. In the hope of understanding them better, I taught a PhD seminar on them in Fall 2022. Two of my students, Amel … Continue reading Getting to know iqrārs
By Marina Rustow I came into my graduate seminar on Arabic legal documents with some experience in paleography and diplomatics, but vanishingly little knowledge of the material I was going to be teaching. I knew I wouldn’t always, or even often, have answers about how to read the sources, let alone how the judicial system … Continue reading Why I No Longer Use the Term “Qāḍī-Court Documents”
I am a social historian of the medieval Middle East, and I work with a relatively neglected type of source: documents, especially sources from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue. I also work with Arabic papyri and paper documents from other sources. Most of … Continue reading Welcome to our January Guest Blogger: Marina Rustow
By Iza Hussin The opening pages of KPG7514.M35 1837,[1] the text that forms the subject of the first blog entry, and texts like it, have given scholars a better sense of how law was understood in the Malay world in its moment: Bahawa Ini Kitab Undang-Undang Qanun Yang Dipakai Dalam Negeri Johor, "this is the … Continue reading How to do things with translation: Translation as archives of mobility
By Iza Hussin Whereas the first of these posts focussed on translation between one text and another, and the second on one set of vocabularies to another, this third post considers inter-imperial translation as a source for one of the most politically productive conflations in the history of modern Islamic legal institutions: personal status/family law/Islamic … Continue reading How to do things with translation: ‘Personal law’
By Iza Hussin Having focussed in the first blog post on a Malay world text and its internal translations of concepts relating to law in Malay, Arabic, and English, this second blog post considers translative dynamics within adjudicative institutions. In the case of the Kitab Undang-Undang Qanun Yang Dipakai Dalam Negeri Johor, we focused on … Continue reading How to do things with translation: ‘Religion’
By Iza Hussin Kitab Undang-Undang Qanun Yang Dipakai Dalam Negeri Johor, 1837 As last week's blog entry briefly introduced, these are the opening pages of KPG7514.M35 1837, a Malay text recently rediscovered at the Library of Congress.[1] The pencilled title on the facing page is in English and underlined: Malay Code of Laws, followed by … Continue reading How to do things with translation: ‘Law’ in the Malay world
By Iza Hussin This series of guest blog posts explores avenues for considering translation as a problematic through which to engage Islamic law in global circulation. This Introduction,[1] and the four posts that follow, sketch out related but distinct ways in which translation matters for the circulation of sharī’a concepts and institutions. The first relates … Continue reading Introduction: How to do things with translation
Iza Hussin is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies and the World History Faculty at the University of Cambridge, and Mohamed Noah Fellow in Asian Politics at Pembroke College Cambridge. Her work focuses on the framing of Islamic law and legal institutions in the political contexts of colonialism and nation-building (The … Continue reading Welcome to our December Guest Blogger: Iza Hussin
