Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Belief as Status: Premodern Islamic Law, Duties, and the Martyr Conundrum" (American Journal of Legal History, October 12, 2023), Adnan A. Zulfiqar (Rutgers Law … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In International Law and Muslim States: Saudi Arabia in Context (Routledge, 2023),  Dawood Hamzah (SOAS) "examines the Saudi Arabia textualist approach to the two primary … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

Diya and the Legacy of Empire

By Rabiat Akande The tussle over diya (compensation for unlawful killing) was one over the locus of sovereignty in the colonial state. For colonial officials, the colonial state and, ultimately, … Continue reading Diya and the Legacy of Empire

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In Religion and Contract Law in Islam: From Medieval Trade to Global Finance (Routledge, 2023), Valentino Cattelan (Birmingham City University), "[u]ndertaking a search that spans … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

Siyāsa Authority in the Colonial State

By Rabiat Akande In 1958, as negotiations over Nigeria’s impending independence from the British Empire were underway, the colonial government invited the muftī of Sudan, Sheikh Mohammed Abul Gasim, to … Continue reading Siyāsa Authority in the Colonial State

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought (Columbia University Press, 2023), Hayrettin Yücesoy (Saint Louis University) argues that "the … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

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

Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

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

Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

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

Detective Stories and Crime Reports

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