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 … Continue reading Fragments of Provincial Life
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 … 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 … 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 … Continue reading Documentary Sources and Islamic Legal History: The View from the Provinces
By Amel Bensalim Professor Marina Rustow's note: "Having been asked twice now to contribute to the ILB, I’ve been making my way into the corpus of Islamic notarial documents preserved … Continue reading Getting to know iqrārs
By Marina Rustow Legal documents have survived from the medieval Islamic world in considerable quantity, but the mystery of their quotidian production and use abides. The mystery concerns personnel and … Continue reading Are Medieval Arabic Judicial Documents as Opaque as They Look?
