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
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
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
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?
