The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Print Collections (Part 2 of 2)

By Sohaib Baig In the previous essay, I explored the transmission of South Asian Muslim scholarship to the Ottoman Empire by analyzing contemporary holdings of Turkish manuscript collections. In this … Continue reading The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Print Collections (Part 2 of 2)

The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Manuscript Collections (Part 1 of 2)

By Sohaib Baig In the previous essay, I provided an overview of contemporary print collections for Islamic law in North American libraries. In the next two essays, I shift focus … Continue reading The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Manuscript Collections (Part 1 of 2)

Islamic Law Collections across 14 North American Libraries

By Sohaib Baig I recently attended a gathering that focused on brainstorming the potential scopes of a digital project on Islamic legal history. Someone posed a deceptively simple question: how … Continue reading Islamic Law Collections across 14 North American Libraries

A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

By Mohammed Allehbi The history of Islamic criminal justice is not written by its enforcers. In fact, the jurists, judges, and other legal scholars who left us most of the … Continue reading A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Continuity and Change of Traditional Islamic Law in Modern Times: tarjīḥ as a Method of Adaptation and Development of Legal Doctrines" (Oxford Journal of … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

By Mohammed Allehbi Despite the lack of surviving archival records from the medieval Islamic world, scribes and other officials would preserve inshāʾ, or administrative documents from the chancery, which they … Continue reading Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "A Short History of Zaydi fiqh" (Leiden Arabic Humanities Blog, April 15, 2023), Eirik Hovden and Ebrahim Mansoor (Leiden University) provide a brief overview … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

By Mohammed Allehbi In the medieval Islamic world, shurṭa were overseers of criminal justice, but, paradoxically, the majority were not scholars of the law. The shurṭa was made up of … Continue reading Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

Detective Stories and Crime Reports

By Mohammed Allehbi Between the eighth and twelfth centuries, military and administrative elites oversaw a complex criminal justice system in the great cities of the Islamic Near East and Mediterranean. … Continue reading Detective Stories and Crime Reports

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "On The Historical Potential of Zaydi Legal Sources" (Leiden Arabic Humanities Blog, June 16, 2023), Najam Haider (Barnard College) observes that Zaydī sources have … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup