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 upon the particular historical context, the institutional strength of one school or another, the social context of education, and other factors. In some places and … Continue reading Riddles, Influence, and Borrowing from Rival Legal Schools
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 fascinated. I had never heard of the genre and could find little about it. The riddles themselves had a playful literariness to them, which appealed … Continue reading Why Study Islamic Legal Riddles?
By Omar Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar This is a summary of the lecture by Prof. Mohammad Fadel entitled "Form, Function and Historical Development of Mukthasars in Post-Mamluk Islamic Law," delivered on February 24, 2021 at 11am (EST), 5pm (Münster) 7pm (Istanbul) via Zoom. The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here. Professor Fadel’s lecture described … Continue reading Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres: “Genre as a Tool for Understanding Islamic Law” by Prof. Mohammad Fadel
By Kristina L. Richardson For centuries the Sunnī Mālikī madhhab has predominated among Muslims of northern and western Africa, but before the 12th century, Shīʿī, Khārijī, and Ibāḍī legal schools vied for dominance.[1] Merchants living under the Ibāḍī Rustamids (779-909, capital in Tāhart) and in independent Khārijī states in the western Maghrib, such as the … Continue reading Ibāḍism in the Medieval Sahel
In "Innovation, Influence, and Borrowing in Mamluk-Era Legal Maxim Collections: The Case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and al-Qarāfī" (Journal of the American Oriental Society 140, no. 4 (October-December 2020)), Mariam Sheibani (University of Toronto Scarborough; Lead Blog Editor) shows that the renowned Mālikī jurist al-Qarāfī's contribution to Islamic legal thought was, in part, based on … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Omar Farahat This is the first of two posts that discuss sixteenth-century Egyptian Ottoman court records. In this post, I offer translations of three decisions and briefly explain their context. In the second post, I will provide some reflections on the structure of those records and its implications. This post includes translations of three … Continue reading Translations of Three Tenth/Sixteenth Century Egyptian Ottoman Court Decisions
Interview conducted by Ari Schriber, Morocco Editor Nour-Eddine Qaouar is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Muhammad V University (Rabat, Morocco) where he studies the applicability of finance-related fatwās from classical sharīʿa to contemporary questions of Islamic finance. He is also Sharīʿa Auditor at Dar Assafaa, the Islamic window of … Continue reading Interview :: Islamic Finance: New Developments in Morocco’s Sharīʿa-Compliant Banking
