In her book review of Mohammed Fadel and Connell Monette's translation of Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, Adday Hernández (ILC-CSIS) welcomes the translation and describes it as a work that will become "one of the main reference sources" in the field of Islamic legal studies. In her undergraduate thesis entitled "I Know How the Caged Bird Tweets: Online Dissent … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Mahmood Kooria The Qurra-Fatḥ was received well among the Shāfiʿī Muslims, especially in the nineteenth century—a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm in terms of its geographical, intellectual, and cultural realms. To highlight the ruptures in the long commentarial traditions of the school, in this last blogpost I focus on two works, both of … Continue reading Two Supercommentaries
In Rediscovery and Revival in Islamic Environmental Law: Back to the Future of Nature's Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Samira Idllalenè (Cadi Ayyad University, Marakesh) argues that commonalities across religions and different legal systems, including common law, Islamic law, and environmental law, can be employed to create better protections against climate change. In Reopening Muslim … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Mahmood Kooria By the sixteenth century the Muslim communities on the Indian Ocean littoral were participating intensively in Islamic intellectual networks, producing many jurists and composing many texts. They made lengthy journeys to religious educational centers such as Mecca, and this had a significant impact on the production of a huge corpus of literature … Continue reading An Autocommentary
By Mahmood Kooria The most renowned commentary of the Minhāj is Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj written by Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (1504-1567), an Egyptian scholar who built up a successful career in Mecca. This commentary, too, represents the internal dynamics of the discursive traditions within the Shāfiʿī school as well as its historical trajectories expanding to unprecedented lands. … Continue reading A Commentary
By Mahmood Kooria The Minhāj al-ṭālibīn of Yaḥyā al-Nawawī (1233-1277) is the text that codified Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law. No other text has attracted as many commentators from within the school in such a wide range of ages and places. Nawawī’s Minhāj is an abridgement of the Muḥarrar by the Persian jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm … Continue reading A Code
Eid festivities have been halted in Gaza due to Israeli airstrikes. International Union of Muslim Scholars recently convened an extraordinary meeting to discuss the recent conflict between Israel and Palestine and its implications on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Governor of California appointed Santa Barbara councilwoman and past Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School (ILSP) … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
In "The Application of Maqasid Al-Shari’ah in the Foreign Policy of Islamic States" (International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 2021), Usman Safiyanu Duguri and others discuss the relevance of the objectives of Islamic law (maqāsid al-sharī'a) to how Muslim-majority nations formulate their foreign policies, with an added observation that maqāsid al-sharī'a … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Mahmood Kooria The postclassical commentarial literature of Islamic law, once ignored for being repetitive and inauthentic, now has been receiving considerable scholarly attention. Through the processes of canonization, codification, regionalization, synthesis and transregional connections; forms such as core texts, commentaries, supercommentaries, autocommentaries, glosses, translations and summaries; and contents such as substantive laws, contextual selections … Continue reading Commentarial Ocean
By Omar Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar This is a summary of the lecture by Prof. Mohammad Fadel entitled "Form, Function and Historical Development of Mukthasars in Post-Mamluk Islamic Law," delivered on February 24, 2021 at 11am (EST), 5pm (Münster) 7pm (Istanbul) via Zoom. Professor Fadel’s lecture described the history, purpose, and nature of late medieval Mālikī mukhtaṣars. … Continue reading Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres: “Genre as a Tool for Understanding Islamic Law” by Prof. Mohammad Fadel
