ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS "US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that 'when the Taliban enacted restrictive bans on higher education for women, governments from across the Muslim world spoke up to condemn the Taliban’s decision,' and that they argued that the actions were inhumane and contrary to Islamic beliefs." For more content and … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "The Method in Understanding Hadith Through Ijmā' and Its Implications for Islamic Law in Indonesia: Studies on the Hadiths of the Month of Qamariyah" (Samarah 7, no. 1 (2023)), Abdul Majid (Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Aji Muhammad Idris, Samarinda) and others investigate how the meaning of certain Prophetic teaching … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Aaron Rock-Singer In the previous essay, I argued that periodicals constitute a vital source for reconstructing the process by which particular legal rulings emerge as authoritative, as well as for tracing the extra-legal factors that drive such developments. In this essay, I continue to explore periodicals as a source of Islamic law by examining … Continue reading The Challenge of Absence: Writing a History of Salafī practice
By Guy Burak [Muḥammad al-Timurtāshī] said in Minaḥ al-Ghaffār: “the sijill is the document (ḥujja) where the verdict (ḥukm) of the judge [is written].” But this is in their custom (ʿurfihim, i.e. al-Timurtāshī and his circle). In our custom (ʿurfinā, presumably the custom endorsed by the Ottoman learned hierarchy and affiliates), it is a large … Continue reading Terminological Tensions
By Guy Burak The increasingly systematic study of Ottoman Islam – or, perhaps, Islam in the Ottoman Empire – is arguably one of the greatest historiographical developments in Islamic studies in recent decades. Indeed, the examination of the relationship between the Ottoman dynasty and multiple Islamic traditions has radically transformed the understanding of the “middle … Continue reading Narrating Change
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Calendar: Student work opportunity: Research assistant, Widener Library, Harvard University. Call for Papers: The 22nd Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies, Harvard University, November 28, 2022. Global Calendar: Call for Papers: The 233rd Meeting of the American Oriental Society 2023, October 15, 2022. Conference: Materiality, Rituals and the Senses … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
By Felicitas Opwis As my previous posts illustrated, commentaries take different forms in length and scope. The commentator selects which topics and points found in the underlying matn he wants to elaborate, explain, and dispute. There is no linear or chronological development of constant growth and enlargement, but a seemingly random variation in breadth and … Continue reading The Forms of Commentaries
By Felicitas Opwis As presented in the previous post, the discursive tradition of commentaries involves extensive intertextuality. This intertextuality is not only a dialogue between matn and sharḥ, but a discourse that engages previous commentaries on the same matn as well as the Shāfiʿī school’s intellectual output more generally. Sometimes, the arguments and positions referenced … Continue reading The Commentary as Platform for Debate, Change, and Authority Construction
By Felicitas Opwis In the previous post I mentioned the vibrant commentary tradition on Abū Shujāʿ’s compendium of Shāfiʿī law, which indicates that Muslim scholars deemed it necessary to comment on the past, making it relevant to their present and incorporating whatever changes have occurred or were deemed desirable. It also allows us to gain … Continue reading The Content of Commentaries
By Felicitas Opwis The study of commentaries (shurūḥ) and glosses (ḥawāshī) has rightly received attention and appreciation in recent years. The scholarship of Asad, El Shamsy, Saleh, Wisnovsky as well as El-Rouayheb, Bauer, and Messick[1] are correcting the previously invoked image of intellectual stagnation and decline of the so-called post-classical period as advocated most forcefully … Continue reading The Discursive Tradition of Commentaries (shurūḥ) – Lessons from Matn Abī Shujāʿ
