ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS Indonesia's Religious Affairs Ministry has stated that it is in talks with Saudi Arabia and the two countries "are looking for ways to reduce the Hajj waiting time to cater to the increasing number of Muslims seeking to perform the ritual." "The Islamic Republic’s Assembly of Experts, the deliberative body … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Dissecting the Asia Bibi Case: A Critical Analysis of Blasphemy Law in Pakistan" (Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice 18, no. 1 (2022)), Muhammad Sadiq Kakar (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) "critically analyses the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was accused of blasphemy and given a … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Athina Pfeiffer Professor Marina Rustow's note: "Having been asked twice now to contribute to the ILB, I’ve been making my way into the corpus of Islamic notarial documents preserved in Cairo Geniza. In the hope of understanding them better, I taught a PhD seminar on them in Fall 2022. Two of my students, Amel … Continue reading Documents of Sale as Living Objects
By Amel Bensalim Professor Marina Rustow's note: "Having been asked twice now to contribute to the ILB, I’ve been making my way into the corpus of Islamic notarial documents preserved in Cairo Geniza. In the hope of understanding them better, I taught a PhD seminar on them in Fall 2022. Two of my students, Amel … Continue reading Getting to know iqrārs
ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS While attention has been paid to Iran's morality police due to the recent protests there, scholars have also written about how the institution of the morality police manifests itself in jurisdictions other than Iran. "In a two-one majority ruling today, the Court of Appeal [of Malaysia] reversed a High Court's … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
By Marina Rustow I came into my graduate seminar on Arabic legal documents with some experience in paleography and diplomatics, but vanishingly little knowledge of the material I was going to be teaching. I knew I wouldn’t always, or even often, have answers about how to read the sources, let alone how the judicial system … Continue reading Why I No Longer Use the Term “Qāḍī-Court Documents”
By Marina Rustow Legal documents have survived from the medieval Islamic world in considerable quantity, but the mystery of their quotidian production and use abides. The mystery concerns personnel and physical location: Who wrote documents, and where? Where did witnesses sign them? To what extent were judges involved in their production and handling? Over the … Continue reading Are Medieval Arabic Judicial Documents as Opaque as They Look?
By Iza Hussin The opening pages of KPG7514.M35 1837,[1] the text that forms the subject of the first blog entry, and texts like it, have given scholars a better sense of how law was understood in the Malay world in its moment: Bahawa Ini Kitab Undang-Undang Qanun Yang Dipakai Dalam Negeri Johor, "this is the … Continue reading How to do things with translation: Translation as archives of mobility
By Iza Hussin Whereas the first of these posts focussed on translation between one text and another, and the second on one set of vocabularies to another, this third post considers inter-imperial translation as a source for one of the most politically productive conflations in the history of modern Islamic legal institutions: personal status/family law/Islamic … Continue reading How to do things with translation: ‘Personal law’
By Iza Hussin Having focussed in the first blog post on a Malay world text and its internal translations of concepts relating to law in Malay, Arabic, and English, this second blog post considers translative dynamics within adjudicative institutions. In the case of the Kitab Undang-Undang Qanun Yang Dipakai Dalam Negeri Johor, we focused on … Continue reading How to do things with translation: ‘Religion’
