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
By Elizabeth Lhost The first farmān (order) (pictured below) in a volume titled Farāmīn-i Niẓāmat-i dār al-qażāʿ-yi balada, min ibtidāʿ–yi sana-yi 1339 H li-ghāyata-yi sana-yi 1350 H, daftar-i Senṫral Rikārḋ, … Continue reading Farāmīn-i Niẓāmat: Looking at legal layers in a royal decree
By Elizabeth Lhost Like a good social scientist, I begin with a diagram. Mir Basit Ali Khan’s Urdu-language Tārīkh-i ʿAdālat-i Āṣafī (History of the Asafi Courts) (1937) opens with a … Continue reading Raftār-i Taraqqī-yi ʿAdālat: Rethinking “progress” in the history of Hyderabad’s Āṣafī Courts
ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS Singapore, invoking the Internal Security Act, detained two people it considered to have "self-radicalized" by listening to speeches and statements made by Ismail Menk, "a … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
