Islamic law scholarship round-up

In How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press), Omar Youssef Cheta (Syracuse University) observes that “when Egypt’s markets opened to private capital in the 1840s, a new infrastructure of commercial laws and institutions emerged. Egypt became the site of profound legal experimentation, and the resulting commercial sphere reflected… CONTINUE READING

In Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press), Marielle Risse (Dhofar University) “examines how middle-class Muslim men and women in Dhofar, Oman, make and negotiate marital choices, tracing every stage of marriage through their own personal accounts.” In “Echoes of Empire: Persian Kingship in the Medieval Islamic World” (The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast),… CONTINUE READING

In “Three lives, one vision: how Dunant, Demidoff and Abdelkader shaped modern humanitarianism” (ICRC Blog) International Committee of the Red Cross experts Anastasia Kushleyko, Cédric Cotter, and Ahmed Al-Dawoody “revisit the contributions of Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, Russian philanthropist Anatole Demidoff, and Algerian scholar and leader Emir Abdelkader. Through their efforts to protect prisoners of war,… CONTINUE READING

The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform (Oxford University Press), edited by Emad Hamdeh (Embry-Riddle University) and Natana J. DeLong-Bas (Boston College), “provides a comprehensive examination of Islamic reform movements and reformist thought across different regions and time periods. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars from around the world, it offers a rigorous and nuanced… CONTINUE READING

Erin Braatz (Suffolk University Law School) recently reviewed Rabiat Akande‘s (University of Toronto) Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press). The book “confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains grapple… CONTINUE READING

In “Integrating Energy Justice and Maqasid al-Shariah to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Malaysia” (International Review of Law), former PIL Senior Research Fellow Wan Mohd Zulhafiz bin Wan Zahari (International Islamic University) and others explore “how the integration of energy justice and Maqasid al-Shariah can enhance Malaysia’s ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals… CONTINUE READING

In The Islamic Reform Movement of the Association of Algerian ʿUlamaʾ, 1931–1954 (Brill), Shoko Watanabe (University of Tokyo) asks, “How are we to understand the internal dynamics of an Islamic reform movement that calls for nationalist rallies and joins a delegation to meet with the French Prime Minister but denies that it ‘does politics’? This… CONTINUE READING

In a recent podcast, Amanie Antar (University of Toronto) interviews Gijs Kruijtzer (independent scholar): “How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law (de Gruyter, 2023) shows that people in both these worlds… CONTINUE READING

In “Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa” (Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā), Clément Salah (University of Oxford ) “examines the figure of Abū al-ʿArab al-Qayrawānī (d. 333/945) as a scribe-scholar in early Islamic North Africa, situating his manuscripts within the broader history of intellectual and material practices in Ifrīqiya.” The article argues that “the… CONTINUE READING

In “Inheritance as a God-Given Right: the Debate on the Family Waqf in 20th and 21st Century Saudi Arabia” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), Dominik Krell (University of Oxford) shows that “that while the debate on the family waqf in other parts of the Arab world was dominated by the… CONTINUE READING