ISLAMIC LAW IN THE NEWS Following the Taliban's rise to power, many law students and lawyers from Afghanistan have reported that "[i]t is not the application of Islamic criminal law that frightens [them], it is that it is applied without due process." Haroun Rahimi, a self-exiled Afghan who was a professor of law at Kabul … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law: In "Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Sultan" (Bloomsbury 2021), Yuval Ben-Bassat (University of Haifa) discusses the institution of petitioning the Ottoman sultan, specifically Abdulhamid II, as a legal remedy in Ottoman Palestine. Abhishek Gupta (Indian Law Institute) discusses Indian Muslims' demand for interest-free Islamic banking in … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
Thank you, Mehdi Berriah, for joining us as guest blog editor in September. In case you missed Prof. Berriah's essays on the financing of jihād in the Mamlūk era, here they are: The Issue of Financing Jihād in Islamic Law: Three Case Studies from the Mamlūk Period Episodes in which the ʿUlamāʾ, according to Islamic … Continue reading Thank you, Mehdi Berriah!
By Mehdi Berriah This is part four in a series of four posts on the financing of jihād during the Mamlūk period. As noted by Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Hanafī al-Ṭarsūsī, the possibility of resorting to the imposition of new taxes or the requisition, on the order of the sultan, of goods to finance a war effort … Continue reading A Lack of Resources in the bayt al-māl: A Sine Qua Non Condition for the Imposition of a Tax?
Islamic Law in the News: Nailah Dean, writer and activist, has introduced her "ISMS Project," comprising a series of images to demonstrate what she terms the "Muslim Marriage Crisis" in an age of "digital, hyper-visual time" that represent sexism, ageism, racism, and colorism. The project represents, in addition to these four "-isms," the Muslim woman's … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
Leading scholars of Islamic law, including Editor-in-Chief, Professor Intisar Rabb, were invited by the University of Bergen for a roundtable on "the use and usefulness of the concepts of canonization and codification in Islamic legal studies." The panels on canonization and codification, respectively, were held online and can be accessed here. "Sharia Law in the … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Mehdi Berriah This is part three in a series of four posts on the financing of jihād during the Mamlūk period. In the cases presented in the sources discussed in the previous post, sultans and amīrs met, in general, with firm opposition on the part of several ʿulamāʾ to the imposition of additional taxes on … Continue reading The Sharīʿa on the Financing of Jihād
The United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban's subsequent takeover of the country has brought, once again, Islam and Islamic law to the fore in recent news coverage, reports, and analyses. This renewed attention to Islamic law is in part due to the fact that the Taliban identifies itself as a Muslim military organization … Continue reading Resource Roundup: Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Islamic Law
Egypt's fatwā authority, Dar Al-Ifta, issued a new edition of Insight magazine that it publishes in English, which discusses women's rights in Islam. In "What is and isnt' Shariah?," Ekrem Bugra Ekinci (Daily Sabah) states that sharī'a is ultimately an effort by scholars to identify and interpret divine rules, which allows for greater flexibility. UN … Continue reading Islamic Law in the News Roundup
The Field Guide to Islamic Law Online, in the form of a Google document, is a collection of resource links and annotations to SHARIAsource and other Harvard resources, global online digital resources, and a robust “Digital Islamic Law Collection.” We recently added exciting resources to this list: Ketabnak is an online resource with digitized contemporary … Continue reading Field Guide to Islamic Law Online
