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
By Elizabeth Lhost In March 1950, Muḥyī-ud-dīn Ṣāḥib sent a request to the dār al-iftāʾ (office for issuing fatwās, judicial opinions) of the Ṣadārat al-ʿĀliya (ecclesiastical department) of the princely state of Hyderabad in which he raised a question about “Zayd’s” use of a registered letter (“regisṫarḋ khaṭ”) to notify his wife of their irrevocable … Continue reading Naql-i Rejisṫarḋ khaṭ: Letters, postcards, and telegrams as sources of law
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Measuring Islamic Legal Philosophy and Islamic Law: a Study of differences, typologies, and objects of study" (El-Aqwal 2, no. 1 (2023)), Muhammad Fuad Zain and Ahmad Zayyadi (Universitas Islam Negeri Profesor Kiai Haji Saifuddin Zuhri Purwokerto) compare Islamic law and Islamic legal philosophy, with a focus on both fields' … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
By Elizabeth Lhost The first farmān (order) (pictured below) in a volume titled Farāmīn-i Niẓāmat-i dār al-qażāʿ-yi balada, min ibtidāʿ–yi sana-yi 1339 H li-ghāyata-yi sana-yi 1350 H, daftar-i Senṫral Rikārḋ, Ḥukūmat-i Ḥaidarābād (Orders from the office of the qażī of the city, from the start of year 1339 AH to the end of year 1350 … Continue reading Farāmīn-i Niẓāmat: Looking at legal layers in a royal decree
By Elizabeth Lhost Like a good social scientist, I begin with a diagram. Mir Basit Ali Khan’s Urdu-language Tārīkh-i ʿAdālat-i Āṣafī (History of the Asafi Courts) (1937) opens with a grand illustration celebrating judicial progress in the princely state of Hyderabad between 1911, when the last independent ruler, Niẓām Mir Osman Ali Khan (r. 1911–1948) … Continue reading Raftār-i Taraqqī-yi ʿAdālat: Rethinking “progress” in the history of Hyderabad’s Āṣafī Courts
By Elizabeth Lhost Sources matter, especially for the study of history. They determine the stories we tell, the perspectives we portray, the experiences we recover. Yet when it comes to telling the story of Islamic legal change in South Asia under British rule, some sources lend themselves more easily and more willingly to narrative history. … Continue reading Breaking out of “Anglo-Muslim” hybrids, or the case for studying the princely states
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Dissecting the Asia Bibi Case: A Critical Analysis of Blasphemy Law in Pakistan" (Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice 18, no. 1 (2022)), Muhammad Sadiq Kakar (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) "critically analyses the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was accused of blasphemy and given a … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Use of Terror To Impose Sharia Laws Forbidden, Pakistan’s Top Islamic Scholars Declare" (The Media Line, January 25, 2023), Arshad Mehmood writes that "Pakistan‘s top Islamic scholars and clerics declared that the use of force to implement Sharia –Islamic law as derived from the Koran and the traditions of … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "The Probate Regime: Enchanted Bureaucracy, Islamic Law, and the Capital of Orphans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt" (Law and History Review (2022)), Adam Mestyan (Duke University) and Rezk Nori (Center for Contemporary History of Egypt) "explore the 'probate regime,' an administrative field of government activity of legally transferring, taxing, and administering … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup
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”
