This study depicts the history of the waqf endowments in Algiers dedicated to the poor of Mecca and Medina over the last 170 years of Ottoman rule. It is one of the first studies of a major public foundation based on its own registers.
Its main themes are: the foundation's growth, its benefactors, the evolution of its patrimony, its administration, managerial policies and functions in the town.
The author discusses the history of the foundation within two contexts - that of the Islamic endowment institution and that of the history of Algiers - and offers new insights into the...

This volume presents annotated English translations of 72 court decisions handed down by the the Sharīʿa Courts of Adjābiya and Kufra roughly during the period 1930-1970; the original texts (facsimiles and edited documents) appeared in A.Layish, Legal Documents on Libyan Tribal Society in Process of Sedentarization (Wiesbaden, 1998). The documents address personal status, succession, homicide and bodily injury, property, obligation, and attest to the interaction between the sharīʿa representing normative Islam, and tribal customary law, representing...

This book explores the nature and role of intent in pre-modern Islamic legal rule books, including ritual, commercial, family, and penal law. It argues that Muslim jurists treat intent as a definitive element of many actions regulated by the Shari'a, and they employ a variety of means and terms to assess and categorize subjective states. Through detailed analyses of medieval Islamic texts, aided by Western philosophical examinations of intent, the author presents technically detailed yet lucid arguments about Islamic religious ritual and spirituality, the ethics of business transactions, the...

This volume introduces six texts of Islamic jurisprudence, authored by six jurists representing all four Sunni schools of Islamic law (two Ḥanafī, two Shāfiʿī, one Malikī, and one Ḥanbalī), who lived in areas as far apart as Uzbekistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza (Palestine), Egypt, and Algeria between the tenth and sixteenth centuries CE. My reading of these texts attempts to articulate an underlying structural interrelationship between theoretical and practical legal reasoning in the Islamic juristic tradition. This volume provides an anatomy of Islamic...

This collective volume, in honor of Aharon Layish, deals with the main components in the laws of Islamic societies, past and present: sharīʿa, custom, and statute. Some chapters focus on one of these components, other discuss the interplay between two or even all three of them. The geographical coverage of the volume is wide, from the Balkans to Yemen, and from Iraq to the Maghrib. The chapters are based on a variety of sources: fiqh literature, fatwās, court decisions, judicial circulars, biographical dictionaries and chronics. The volume will be of...

Dr. 'Abd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī (1895-1971) is one of the most prominent jurists to emerge to date in the Arab world. His alarm at the growing social gap in his country, Egypt, during the first half of the twentieth century, fueled his vision of establishing moral social order by means of a new civil code. Although Sanhūrī's chosen tool was the legal text, this book argues that his vision was essentially a social one: to introduce the principles of compassion, solidarity and fairness, alongside progress and pragmatism, into polarized Egyptian society, whereby property...

Focusing on writings of legal theory by leading jurisprudents from al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/980) to al-Shāṭibī (d. 790/1388), this study traces the Islamic discourse on legal change. It looks at the concept of maṣlaḥa (people's well-being) as a method of extending and adapting God's law, showing how it evolves from an obscure legal principle to being interpreted as the all-encompassing purpose of God's law. Discussions on maṣlaḥa's epistemology, its role in the law-finding process, the limits of human investigation into divinecommands,...

This book is a succinct and critical account on the shariatisation of Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. It is the first book in English to uncover and explain the shariatisation of Indonesia in a comprehensive way. With the abundant primary and secondary sources, this book is a reference for other scholars who conduct research on the inclusion of sharia into legal and public sphere of Indonesia. It comes with an important conclusion that the change of such a non-theocratic state like Indonesia into a theocratic state is highly possible when its law is penetrated by those who...