SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law Ari Schriber (University of Toronto) reviews Jocelyn Hendrickson's (University of Alberta) Leaving Iberia Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard University Press, 2021). In "Theology and Philosophy after al-Ghazali: The End of Philosophy in Islam?" (Marginalia, May 26, 2023), Hasan Hameed (Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University) reviews Frank … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Review of Islamic Law Relating to Motorvehicle Lending in Bandung District" (Journal of Islamic Economic Law 8, no. 1 (2023)), Hardi Fardiansyah (STIH Dharma Andigha Bogor Alamat Surat) and others investigate how a locality in Bandung, Indonesia structures their lending vehicle agreements in a way that incorporates elements of … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "The Method in Understanding Hadith Through Ijmā' and Its Implications for Islamic Law in Indonesia: Studies on the Hadiths of the Month of Qamariyah" (Samarah 7, no. 1 (2023)), Abdul Majid (Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Aji Muhammad Idris, Samarinda) and others investigate how the meaning of certain Prophetic teaching … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
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
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Religion Inspired The Nation-State, But Politics Made The Difference" (Eurasia Review, April 14, 2023), James M. Dorsey (Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies) reviews new scholarship that traces the origins of the modern nation state to earlier periods during the Middle Age by arguing that religion … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
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
By Lev Weitz In my last essay on using digitized sources and databases for historical research with Arabic documents, I used the Arabic Papyrology Database (APD) to discern a concentration of contracts of sale originating from the southern Fayyūm Oasis in late ʿAbbāsid and Fāṭimid Egypt. In this essay, I’ll take a look at these … Continue reading Tracing the Judicial Infrastructure of a Rural Province
By Lev Weitz For the past three decades, scholars have enriched the study of premodern Islamic law with a growing enthusiasm for ‘law in action’[1]—law not only as the sharʿī norms laid down and debated in juristic treatises,[2] but as the processes and practices through which judges, muftīs, and everyday litigants interacted with those norms … Continue reading Documentary Sources and Islamic Legal History: The View from the Provinces
By Elizabeth Lhost During my time as guest blogger this month, I’ve demonstrated how sources from the Indian princely states can help historians overcome the binaries, dichotomies, and oppositions that sometimes hamper the study of colonial legal change, especially in the context of understanding developments in the interpretation, administration, and governance of Islamic law. The … Continue reading Conclusion: Why the princely states? Why now? What’s next?
By Elizabeth Lhost For my final essay this month, I’ve selected the Deccan Law Reports for analysis. Law reports are a familiar genre for many legal historians, and the Deccan Law Reports are exemplars of the genre. Each volume includes cases dedicated to criminal (faujdārī) and civil (dīwānī) cases. There are also cases from the … Continue reading Dekan Lā Ripōrṫ: Familiar genres, unfamiliar stories
