This book focuses on the history and work of the Saudi Dār al-Iftā, one of the most central modern Islamic official religious institutions. The study was undertaken from two perspectives: (1) Dār al-Iftā creation, power structure, functions and the sociopolitical environment in which it operates; and (2) The actual work of this institution, mainly the mechanisms by which modern Saudi state muftis cope with clashes between Wahhābī idealism and the reality of an evolving society. This is a critical work which updates the readers' grasp of contemporary law and...

This volume compares the courtroom oaths of both Islamic and modern Egyptian legal systems, blending elements of legal history, comparative law, theology, philosophy and culture. Until now, academic research has paid little attention to the subject of the courtroom oath in the Islamic or Egyptian legal systems. As such, it might appear as if modern legislation in the Arab world on this subject forms the natural continuation of Islamic law, or that there are no significant differences between these two legal approaches. This unique study seeks to rectify this impression by examining the...

Drawing on Hanafi fatawa and legal commentaries from Ottoman Syria between the 17th and early 19th centuries, this book examines the legal status of tenants and sharecroppers on arable lands, most of which were state or waqf properties. Challenging existing scholarship which argues that the status of cultivators gradually eroded after the 16th century, this study explores how jurists balanced the rights and obligations of tenants and landlords, thereby ensuring the adaptability of the Ottoman land system. The work addresses the differences between sharecropping and tenancy arrangements, the...

In Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, twenty-three scholars each contribute a chapter on a distinguished Muslim jurist. The volume is organized chronologically and it includes jurists who represent the formative, classical and modern periods of Islamic legal thought. Each chapter contains both a biography of an individual jurist and a translated sample of his work. The biographies emphasize the scholarly milieu in which the jurist worked--his teachers, colleagues and pupils, as well as the type of juridical thinking for which he is best known. The translated sample...

The Sunni schools of law are named for jurisprudents of the eighth and ninth centuries, but they did not actually function so early. The main division at that time was rather between adherents of ra'y and ḥadīth. No school had a regular means of forming students. Relying mainly on biographical dictionaries, this study traces the constitutive elements of the classical schools and finds that they first came together in the early tenth century, particularly with the work of Ibn Surayj (d. 306/918), al-Khallāl (d. 311/923), and a series of ḥanafī teachers...

The contributions of Bernard Weiss to the study of the principles of jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh) are recognized in a series of contributions on Islamic legal theory. These thirteen chapters study a range of Islamic texts and employ contemporary legal, religious, and hermeneutical theory to study the methodology of Islamic law. Contributors include: Peter Sluglett, Ahmed El Shamsy, Eric Chaumont, A. Kevin Reinhart, Mohammad Fadel, Jonathan Brockopp, Christian Lange, Raquel M. Ukeles, Paul Powers, Robert Gleave, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Joseph Lowry, Rudolph Peters, Frank E. Vogel

The Reconquista left unprecedentedly large numbers of Muslims living under Christian rule. Since Islamic religious and legal institutions had been developed by scholars who lived under Muslim rule and who assumed this condition as a given, how Muslims should proceed in the absence of such rule became the subject of extensive intellectual investigation. In Islamic Law and the Crisis of the Reconquista, Alan Verskin examines the way in which the Iberian school of Mālikī law developed in response to the political, theological, and practical difficulties posed by the Reconquista....

In this book, Amr Osman seeks to expand and re-interpret what we know about the history and doctrine of the Ẓāhirī madhhab. Based on an extensive prosopographical survey, he concludes that the founder, Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī, was closer in profile and doctrine to the Ahl al-Ra'y than to the Ahl al-Ḥadīth. Furthermore, Ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī may have had a damaging effect on the madhhab, which never actually developed into a full-fledged school of law. By examining the meaning of 'ẓāhir' and...

This is the first collection of studies entirely devoted to the terminological pair dār al-islām / dar al-ḥarb, "the abode of Islam" and "the abode of war," apparently widely known as representative of "the Islamic vision" of the world, but in fact almost unexplored. A team of specialists in different fields of Islamic studies investigates the issue in its historical and conceptual origins as well as in its reception within the different genres of Muslim written production. In contrast to the fixed and permanent categories they are currently identified with, the...

This volume is a tribute to the work of legal and social historian and Arabist Rudolph Peters (University of Amsterdam). Presenting case studies from different periods and areas of the Muslim world, the book examines the use of legal documents for the study of the history of Muslim societies. From examinations of the conceptual status of legal documents to comparative studies of the development of legal formulae and the socio-economic or political historical information documents contain, the aim is to approach legal documents as specialised texts belonging to a specific social domain, while...