Welcome to our June Guest Bloggers: Robert Gleave and Kumail Rajani

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Robert Gleave is Principal Investigator of the Law, Authority and Learning In Imami Shiite Islam project (LAWALISI), based at the University of Exeter, a five-year project funded by the European research Council (www.lawalisi.eu).  His main research has been in Shi’i legal developments in the premodern period, with an occasional foray in the 20th and even 21st centuries.  … Continue reading Welcome to our June Guest Bloggers: Robert Gleave and Kumail Rajani

Thank you, Matthew L. Keegan!

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Thank you, Matthew L. Keegan, for joining us as guest blog editor in May. In case you missed his essays, here they are: Why Study Islamic Legal Riddles? Riddles, Influence, and Borrowing from Rival Legal Schools Moral Registers in Islamic Law, Adab, and Ethics Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination Thank you! Follow Matthew L. … Continue reading Thank you, Matthew L. Keegan!

Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination

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By Matthew L. Keegan How do we imagine the law? What shapes our sense of how the legal system operates? In a culture saturated with television narratives, one clear avenue for shaping the imagined law is the various franchises and spin-offs of television shows like Law & Order and CSI, which give viewers a heavily … Continue reading Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination

Moral Registers in Islamic Law, Adab, and Ethics

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By Matthew L. Keegan Islamic law is one among several Islamic discourses and normative discourses that intermingled with Islamic epistemes and ecumenes in the pre-modern world. In Marion Holmes Katz's recent monograph, readers encounter a sophisticated reading of the intersecting and divergent approaches of law, asceticism, and Islamic philosophical ethics. As she demonstrates in one … Continue reading Moral Registers in Islamic Law, Adab, and Ethics

Riddles, Influence, and Borrowing from Rival Legal Schools

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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

Why Study Islamic Legal Riddles?

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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?

Welcome to our May Guest Blogger: Matthew L. Keegan

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Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research program explores the intersections of Islamic law and Arabic literature. He has published articles on Islamic legal riddles, Quranic exegesis, the commentary tradition around al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt, and the prose and poetry of the … Continue reading Welcome to our May Guest Blogger: Matthew L. Keegan

Thank you, Lev Weitz!

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Thank you, Lev Weitz, for joining us as guest blog editor in April. In case you missed his essays, here they are: Documentary Sources and Islamic Legal History: The View from the Provinces Tracing the Judicial Infrastructure of a Rural Province Tax Receipts and Rent for a Mill: The Multiple Normative Orders of Medieval Islamic … Continue reading Thank you, Lev Weitz!

Fragments of Provincial Life

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By Lev Weitz For social historians, legal sources have been among the most captivating, tried-and-true means to get at the microhistorical detail of everyday life in times past. In the final essay of this series, I’ll consider what Arabic legal documents can offer as sources for medieval social history. We’ll return to the region of … Continue reading Fragments of Provincial Life

Tax Receipts and Rent for a Mill: The Multiple Normative Orders of Medieval Islamic Societies

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By Lev Weitz My last essay in this series showed how Arabic documentary sources can extend our view of the practical operation of Islamic law from urban centers into medieval countrysides that are largely invisible in literary and normative sources. In this essay, we’ll again use documents to shed light on an otherwise obscure facet … Continue reading Tax Receipts and Rent for a Mill: The Multiple Normative Orders of Medieval Islamic Societies