This volume examines Islamic maritime law and the actual practice of Muslim sailors during the classical period. It contains seven chapters. The first surveys the important terminology of maritime life. The second chapter examines the interrelationship of shipowners, crew, and passengers. The third chapter deals with maritime commercial laws; contracts for the leasing of ships, freight charges, transportation of goods, taxes and tolls in the ports. It also examines losses at sea, describes the laws concerning of jettison and general average, collision, and salvage of jetsam. Chapter...

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...

The author proposes in this study a new, integrative approach to the phenomenon of Muslim pious foundations, or waqfs. The evolution of the institution is analysed from the perspective of the formation of power systems, which shaped both the elaboraton of the textual framework of the institution and the practices connected with the founding and administration of waqf-objects. The growing interference of the state in the field of waqfs and in the hierarchy of the ulama is seen as essential for the development of the institution in the Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods....

In this volume, two classical texts of legal theory (usūl al-fiqh) are analysed. The authors of these works belonged to two schools of Shī'ī jurisprudence: Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī (d. 1186/1772) was a key figure in the Akhbārī school, and his adversary, Muḥammad Bāqir al-Bihbahāanī (d. 1206/1791-2) was credited with the revival of the Usūli school and the defeat of Akhbarism after Baḥrānī's death. Through a comparison of the two writers' theories, this work describes the major areas of...

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,...