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 previous essays, I have laid out key opportunities and challenges in using media sources to tell an intellectual and social history of Islamic law, with a particular emphasis on print media forms such as periodicals and pamphlets. In this final essay, I will explore two media forms that present greater challenges … Continue reading Audio and Audio-Visual Sources and Pathways Forward
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 Aaron Rock-Singer The opening essay of this series provided an overview of the pros and cons of studying Islamic law from the perspective of varied media sources, with a particular focus on Islamic print media and its internal dynamics of authority. This essay, derived from my recent book, In the Shade of the Sunna: … Continue reading Islamic periodicals and Islamic law: the case of gender segregation
By Aaron Rock-Singer The field of pre-modern Islamic history is replete with fascinating studies of social and intellectual history that rely on fatwā collections. Scholars such as David Powers, Jocelyn Hendrickson, and Marion Katz[1] – to name just a few – have powerfully illustrated the richness of this genre in tracing the relationship among elites, … Continue reading Sources for Islamic Law and Society in the modern period: A methodological reflection
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law: In Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Mahmood Kooria (Universiteit Leiden and Ashoka University, India) "explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia, … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
For the month of August, we are featuring one, in-depth post by our guest editor, Professor Hossein Modarressi, of Princeton University, and will resume our regular schedule of guest editor contributions in September with the start of the new academic year. By Hossein Modarressi* This paper aims to demonstrate how a religious worldview on the … Continue reading Theology of Delegation and Its Impact on Islamic Legal Thought
By Mahmood Kooria The Minhāj al-ṭālibīn of Yaḥyā al-Nawawī (1233-1277) is the text that codified Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law. No other text has attracted as many commentators from within the school in such a wide range of ages and places. Nawawī’s Minhāj is an abridgement of the Muḥarrar by the Persian jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm … Continue reading A Code
By Kristina L. Richardson Given the centuries of exposure to northern African Islamic thought like Khārijism, Ibāḍism, and Mālikism, could sub-Saharan Muslims have established an indigenous, perhaps syncretic, Islamic legal school? 17th-century Ottoman explorer Evliya Çelebi claimed as much, though we may have to take his descriptions with a grain of salt. Between August 1672 … Continue reading A “Jabri” madhhab of the early modern Sudan?
