ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS "A Quran burning and a string of requests to approve protests involving the destruction of more holy books have left Sweden torn between its commitment … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS Pundits have argued that the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law, including its many restrictions on the rights of women, is making it harder for … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
By Matthew L. Keegan How do we imagine the law? What shapes our sense of how the legal system operates? In a culture saturated with television narratives, one clear avenue … Continue reading Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination
By Matthew L. Keegan Islamic law is one among several Islamic discourses and normative discourses that intermingled with Islamic epistemes and ecumenes in the pre-modern world. In Marion Holmes Katz's … Continue reading Moral Registers in Islamic Law, Adab, and Ethics
By Lev Weitz For social historians, legal sources have been among the most captivating, tried-and-true means to get at the microhistorical detail of everyday life in times past. In the … Continue reading Fragments of Provincial Life
By Lev Weitz My last essay in this series showed how Arabic documentary sources can extend our view of the practical operation of Islamic law from urban centers into medieval … Continue reading Tax Receipts and Rent for a Mill: The Multiple Normative Orders of Medieval Islamic Societies
By Lev Weitz In my last essay on using digitized sources and databases for historical research with Arabic documents, I used the Arabic Papyrology Database (APD) to discern a concentration … Continue reading Tracing the Judicial Infrastructure of a Rural Province
By Lev Weitz For the past three decades, scholars have enriched the study of premodern Islamic law with a growing enthusiasm for ‘law in action’[1]—law not only as the sharʿī … Continue reading Documentary Sources and Islamic Legal History: The View from the Provinces
By Elizabeth Lhost For my final essay this month, I’ve selected the Deccan Law Reports for analysis. Law reports are a familiar genre for many legal historians, and the Deccan … Continue reading Dekan Lā Ripōrṫ: Familiar genres, unfamiliar stories
By Elizabeth Lhost In March 1950, Muḥyī-ud-dīn Ṣāḥib sent a request to the dār al-iftāʾ (office for issuing fatwās, judicial opinions) of the Ṣadārat al-ʿĀliya (ecclesiastical department) of the princely … Continue reading Naql-i Rejisṫarḋ khaṭ: Letters, postcards, and telegrams as sources of law
