Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Legitimating Sultanic Rule in Arabic, Turkish and Persian—Late Mamluk Rulers as Authors of Religious Poetry" (in Rulers as Authors in the Islamic World, eds., … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

By Mohammed Allehbi The history of Islamic criminal justice is not written by its enforcers. In fact, the jurists, judges, and other legal scholars who left us most of the … Continue reading A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

By Mohammed Allehbi Despite the lack of surviving archival records from the medieval Islamic world, scribes and other officials would preserve inshāʾ, or administrative documents from the chancery, which they … Continue reading Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

By Mohammed Allehbi In the medieval Islamic world, shurṭa were overseers of criminal justice, but, paradoxically, the majority were not scholars of the law. The shurṭa was made up of … Continue reading Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

Detective Stories and Crime Reports

By Mohammed Allehbi Between the eighth and twelfth centuries, military and administrative elites oversaw a complex criminal justice system in the great cities of the Islamic Near East and Mediterranean. … Continue reading Detective Stories and Crime Reports

Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination

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

Moral Registers in Islamic Law, Adab, and Ethics

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

Riddles, Influence, and Borrowing from Rival Legal Schools

By Matthew L. Keegan How did scholars from different Sunnī legal schools respond to and interact with the scholarship of other schools? The answer to this question, of course, depends … Continue reading Riddles, Influence, and Borrowing from Rival Legal Schools

Why Study Islamic Legal Riddles?

By Matthew L. Keegan When I first came across a chapter on legal riddles in the Kitāb al-Ashbāh wa’l-Naẓāʾir of Ibn Nujaym (d. 970/1563) in graduate school, I was immediately … Continue reading Why Study Islamic Legal Riddles?

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In Peace and Reconciliation in International Islamic Law (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), Kaleem Hussain (University of Birmingham) "presents a lucid analysis, observing how the sources … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup