Everything from reviews of recent publications and cases to reflections on the book-writing and tenure process for scholars in Islamic law. Junior and senior scholars known in the field of Islamic legal studies are invited to become guest editors of the blog for one-month terms. The posts do not undergo editorial review, and offer room for these scholars to content and context on Islamic law, and more.
By Sohaib Baig In the previous essay, I explored the transmission of South Asian Muslim scholarship to the Ottoman Empire by analyzing contemporary holdings of Turkish manuscript collections. In this … Continue reading The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Print Collections (Part 2 of 2)
By Sohaib Baig In the previous essay, I provided an overview of contemporary print collections for Islamic law in North American libraries. In the next two essays, I shift focus … Continue reading The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Manuscript Collections (Part 1 of 2)
By Sohaib Baig I recently attended a gathering that focused on brainstorming the potential scopes of a digital project on Islamic legal history. Someone posed a deceptively simple question: how … Continue reading Islamic Law Collections across 14 North American Libraries
Sohaib Baig is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian, and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He completed his PhD in History at … Continue reading Welcome to our August Guest Blogger: Sohaib Baig
Thank you, Mohammed Allehbi, for joining us as guest blog editor in July. In case you missed his essays, here they are: Detective Stories and Crime Reports Mirrors for Criminal … Continue reading Thank you, Mohammed Allehbi!
By Mohammed Allehbi The history of Islamic criminal justice is not written by its enforcers. In fact, the jurists, judges, and other legal scholars who left us most of the … Continue reading A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus
By Mohammed Allehbi Despite the lack of surviving archival records from the medieval Islamic world, scribes and other officials would preserve inshāʾ, or administrative documents from the chancery, which they … Continue reading Diplomas for Crime and Punishment
By Mohammed Allehbi In the medieval Islamic world, shurṭa were overseers of criminal justice, but, paradoxically, the majority were not scholars of the law. The shurṭa was made up of … Continue reading Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates
By Mohammed Allehbi Between the eighth and twelfth centuries, military and administrative elites oversaw a complex criminal justice system in the great cities of the Islamic Near East and Mediterranean. … Continue reading Detective Stories and Crime Reports
Mohammed Allehbi is the PIL-LC Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and the Library of Congress for the 2023–2024 academic year. He specializes in … Continue reading Welcome to our July Guest Blogger: Mohammed Allehbi
