By Mehdi Berriah This is part one in a series of four posts on the financing of jihād during the Mamlūk period. While the spirit and laws of jihād have often attracted the attention of researchers, this is not the case for its economic aspect, which remains poorly known. It must be kept in mind … Continue reading The Issue of Financing Jihād in Islamic Law: Three Case Studies from the Mamlūk Period
By Omar Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar This is a summary of the lecture by Prof. Murteza Bedir entitled “Form, Function, and Historical Development of Uṣūl al-Fiqh as a Genre” delivered on January 27, 2021 at 12 noon (EST), 6 pm (Münster) 7 pm (Istanbul) via Zoom. Professor Murteza Bedir inaugurated the monthly lectures on Islamic legal genres … Continue reading Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres: “Form, Function, and Historical Development of Uṣūl al-Fiqh as a Genre” by Prof. Murteza Bedir
By Omar Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar This is a summary of the lecture by Prof. Christian Mueller entitled “Sijills and Transformations of Qāḍī Documents in Islamic Law” delivered at 12 noon (EST), 6 pm (Münster) 7 pm (Istanbul) via Zoom. Professor Müller offered this month what he himself termed as a reflection on Ottoman sijills “from the … Continue reading Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres: “Sijills and Transformations of Qāḍī Documents in Islamic Law” by Prof. Christian Mueller
By Omar Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar This is a summary of the lecture by Prof. Maribel Fierro entitled “Fatāwā Compilations: Exploring a legal genre in the Islamic West,” delivered on June 30, 2021 at 12 noon (EST), 6 pm (Münster) 7 pm (Istanbul) via Zoom. Thus far in the ILG series, each speaker has touched on how … Continue reading Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres: “Fatāwā Compilations: Exploring a legal genre in the Islamic West” by Prof. Maribel Fierro
By Nurfadzilah Yahaya My book Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) traces changing notions of family and clan across legal cultures in the realm of family law. Supposedly, Islamic law does not enter the secular sphere of politics during the colonial period. Yet, although dissipation of political power … Continue reading Family Law as Colonial Specter of Shelter
By Omar Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar This is a summary of the lecture by Prof. Ahmed El Shamsy entitled “What Kind of Gloss is a Ḥashiya?,” delivered on April 28, 2021 at 12 noon (EST), 6 pm (Münster) 7 pm (Istanbul) via Zoom. Professor El Shamsy’s lecture described the history, impact, and receptions of legal ḥāshiya literature, … Continue reading Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres: “Genre as a Tool for Understanding Islamic Law” by Prof. Ahmed al-Shamsy
The new issue of the Journal of Islamic Law at Harvard Law School (Journal of Islamic Law 2, no. 1 (2021)) has been published online. The new issue includes an article by Sohaira Siddiqui (Georgetown University) entitled "Triple Divorce and the Political Context of Islamic Law in India" that discusses the recent enactment of an … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Ayman Shabana In the Islamic juristic tradition, the relationship between sharīʿa and custom raised important methodological questions, ranging from: the nature and number of sources, formulation of rulings, guidelines for the understanding and interpretation of the scriptural texts, and implementation and application of legal rules particularly in novel cases requiring independent reasoning. In general, … Continue reading Sharīʿa, Custom, and Modern Legal Reform
By Mahmood Kooria The Qurra-Fatḥ was received well among the Shāfiʿī Muslims, especially in the nineteenth century—a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm in terms of its geographical, intellectual, and cultural realms. To highlight the ruptures in the long commentarial traditions of the school, in this last blogpost I focus on two works, both of … Continue reading Two Supercommentaries
By Mahmood Kooria By the sixteenth century the Muslim communities on the Indian Ocean littoral were participating intensively in Islamic intellectual networks, producing many jurists and composing many texts. They made lengthy journeys to religious educational centers such as Mecca, and this had a significant impact on the production of a huge corpus of literature … Continue reading An Autocommentary
