By Elizabeth Urban For my final essay, I want to move away from research and into pedagogy. I teach a 4/4 load at a regional university. Most of my students … Continue reading Playing with Islamic Law in the Undergraduate Classroom
By Elizabeth Urban For the results I presented in my first and second essays, I used the search function on al-Maktaba al-Shamela to search for the key terms mawlāh and … Continue reading Vocabularies of Enslavement & Unfreedom
By Elizabeth Urban In my previous essay, I wrote about how ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s (d. 211/827) al-Muṣannaf features freedwomen in “tricky” inheritance cases; in this essay I turn to Ibn Abī … Continue reading Freedwomen in Ibn Abī Shayba’s al-Muṣannaf
By Elizabeth Urban Scholars who have studied manumission in early Islamic contexts have usually focused on male freedmen (mawālī).[1] Conversely, scholars who have studied unfree women have usually focused on … Continue reading Freedwomen in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s al-Muṣannaf
Elizabeth Urban is Associate Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in the first two centuries of Islamic history. She particularly seeks to understand how Islam … Continue reading Welcome to our November Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Urban
By Rabiat Akande The tussle over diya (compensation for unlawful killing) was one over the locus of sovereignty in the colonial state. For colonial officials, the colonial state and, ultimately, … Continue reading Diya and the Legacy of Empire
By Rabiat Akande In 1958, as negotiations over Nigeria’s impending independence from the British Empire were underway, the colonial government invited the muftī of Sudan, Sheikh Mohammed Abul Gasim, to … Continue reading Siyāsa Authority in the Colonial State
By Rabiat Akande There has been an explosion of interest in interrogating the impact and legacies of European colonialism in recent decades. To an extent, this interest reflects a broader … Continue reading Colonialism and Islamic Law
Rabiat Akande is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto and the inaugural Chair of the African International Legal History Project at the African Institute … Continue reading Welcome to our October Guest Blogger: Rabiat Akande
In September, we look back at some of our most read essays published in the past year as well as the roundtables we convened in the past that attracted a … Continue reading Best of 2022-2023 & Roundtables in Review: Our Past Roundtables
