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 iqrÄrs
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 “QÄá¸Ä«-Court Documentsâ€
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?
ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS "Women in Afghanistan carried out a protest against the Taliban-led regime after they banned women from working for Non-Government Organisations (NGOs)." "Even before the Taliban barred Afghan women from working at non-governmental groups, their forces visited the office of one local organization in the capital Kabul several times to check … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "The ICC and Traditional Islamic Legal Scholarship: Analysing the War Crimes Against Civilians" (in International Criminal Law: A Counter-Hegemonic Project, 2022), Fajri Matahati Muhammadin (Universitas Gadjah Mada) and Ahmad Sadzali (Universitas Islam Indonesia) argue that "if Islamic law has prescribed criminalization for international crimes up to a standard which … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
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’
ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS "The UN experts demanded an immediate cessation of public floggings and execution while reminding the Afghan government of the country’s standing as a state party to both the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." "The Afghan government on Tuesday barred women from attending private … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
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’
By Iza Hussin Kitab Undang-Undang Qanun Yang Dipakai Dalam Negeri Johor, 1837 As last week's blog entry briefly introduced, these are the opening pages of KPG7514.M35 1837, a Malay text recently rediscovered at the Library of Congress.[1] The pencilled title on the facing page is in English and underlined: Malay Code of Laws, followed by … Continue reading How to do things with translation: ‘Law’ in the Malay world
