By Marina Rustow I came into my graduate seminar on Arabic legal documents with some experience in paleography and diplomatics, but vanishingly little knowledge of the material I was going to be teaching. I knew I wouldn’t always, or even often, have answers about how to read the sources, let alone how the judicial system … Continue reading Why I No Longer Use the Term “Qāḍī-Court Documents”
By Marina Rustow Legal documents have survived from the medieval Islamic world in considerable quantity, but the mystery of their quotidian production and use abides. The mystery concerns personnel and physical location: Who wrote documents, and where? Where did witnesses sign them? To what extent were judges involved in their production and handling? Over the … Continue reading Are Medieval Arabic Judicial Documents as Opaque as They Look?
I am a social historian of the medieval Middle East, and I work with a relatively neglected type of source: documents, especially sources from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue. I also work with Arabic papyri and paper documents from other sources. Most of … Continue reading Welcome to our January Guest Blogger: Marina Rustow
Thank you, Iza Hussin for joining us as guest blog editor in December. In case you missed her blog posts, here they are: Introduction: How to do things with translation How to do things with translation: ‘Law’ in the Malay world How to do things with translation: ‘Religion’ How to do things with translation: ‘Personal … Continue reading Thank you, Iza Hussin!
