By Paolo Sartori In 2018, the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Dagestan published a collection of fatāwā (Islsamic legal opinions) crafted between the 1950s and 1980s by the cleric Muḥammad … Continue reading Qāḍī by Necessity: Muḥammad al-Khartikunī against the “Wahhabis” in 1980s Dagestan
By Paolo Sartori In 1956 rumors spread in Socialist Kyrgyzstan that the apocalypse was imminent, and it would happen in the early summer of that year.[1] A date was set … Continue reading Apocalypse in the Tian Shan: Or the Story of a Wasted Fatwā
By Paolo Sartori Female suicides plagued Soviet Central Asia at least since the 1950s,[1] but their number increased significantly in the 1980s, during which period they became a matter of … Continue reading Saving Lost Souls: Fatwās Against Suicide in Socialist Uzbekistan
After the completion of a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies (History and Philology) at the University of Rome ‘la Sapienza” (2006), Paolo Sartori was a Volkswagen Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Martin-Luther … Continue reading Welcome to our July Guest Blogger: Paolo Sartori
By Edmund Hayes A great body of Twelver legal doctrines is expressed through the Twelver ḥadīth corpus. A large body of these reports, like Sunnī ḥadīth, take the narrative form … Continue reading Servicing the Needs of a Community: Imamic Agency versus Local Demands
By Edmund Hayes In my first essay, I raised the question: was there an early Imāmī Shīʿī legal system? In order to think about this question, it is convenient to … Continue reading The Practical Agency of the Shīʿī Imams
By Edmund Hayes In 260/874, upon the death of the Eleventh Imam of the Twelver Shīʿa, al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskari, a crisis hit the inner circle of the Imam’s family. The Imam’s … Continue reading The Rejection of Legal Pluralism and Its Consequences
By Edmund Hayes When we speak of Shīʿī law, we usually mean the legal edifice of Twelver Shīʿīsm, which developed in the centuries following the collapse of the historical imamate … Continue reading Was There an Early Imāmī Shīʿī Legal System?
Edmund Hayes is a University Lecturer in the History of Islam at Leiden University. His research focus is the social history of early Shīʿa Islam, especially in its Imāmī and … Continue reading Welcome to our June Guest Blogger: Edmund Hayes
By Bahman Khodadadi As Muslim jurist Mohsen Kadivar observes, in traditional fiqh (Islamic law), certain punishments prescribed by sharīʿa can be carried out “by any adult Muslim (mukallaf) based on … Continue reading God’s Wish or Mortal Error? The Iranian State’s Blessing for Vigilantism
