Abstract This article combines “distant” (computational) and “close” (human) reading techniques to investigate jurisprudential continuity, borrowing, and attribution within the fatwa compilations of Ottoman şeyhülislam s. We analyze the lexical and semantic characteristics of six major corpora that span the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries to identify the extent and nature of textual replication, adaptation, and conceptual overlap across thousands of fatwas. The results reveal extensive inter-corpora connections, including verbatim replications, across multiple compilations, though stronger between some than others. Some of these connections challenge prevalent assumptions about originality and authorship in Ottoman ifta practices, while others point to sustained intellectual engagement across generations of jurists.
Abstract In this article, I examine juristic discourses from the fifth/eleventh through tenth/sixteenth centuries on the hypothetical case of a starving person taking another’s food or property across four Sunni schools of law. Examination of these juristic discourses provides insight into an active, creative debate about the ethical parameters of the law, and how law and ethics interact. It also provides insight into how jurists engaged in and debated legal methodology and its application to extreme (and often hard) cases. I argue that it was particularly through such hypotheticals of exceptional and hard cases that jurists explored legality, the foundations and limits of the law, and how far the law can respond to fact patterns and lived experience while remaining internally cohesive. This study thus contributes to our understanding of the history of Islamic law by showing that it is in these factually minimal, yet hard hypothetical cases that the jurists carefully articulated their legal process and interrogated the internal ordering and coherence of the legal system.
Abstract This article undertakes the first systematic comparison between the Prophetic legal maxim laysa li-ʿirq ẓālim ḥaqq “No legitimate right arises from a root planted by an oppressor” and the Anglo-American doctrine of adverse possession. I begin by analyzing the ḥadīth ’s chain of transmission and language—particularly the meanings of ʿirq (root) and ẓālim (oppressor)—to determine its jurisprudential authority. I distill from classical Islamic law three necessary conditions for identifying “a root planted by an oppressor”: absence of a valid legal entitlement ( sabab al-milk ), lack of the original owner’s consent, and the intent to claim permanence. Drawing on the Sunni doctrine, I contrast this framework with the development and doctrinal structure of adverse possession in Anglo-American common law, with its emphasis on continuous, hostile, and overt occupation. I argue that whereas secular legal systems convert time-based possession into legal title, Islamic law insists on a normative framework anchored in justice, consent, and evidentiary proof. I conclude by asserting the coherence and normative force of Islamic property doctrine and proposing new empirical avenues for exploring how legitimacy underpins durable property systems.
Résumé Al-Suyūṭī (m. 911/1505) occupe une place singulière dans l’histoire des sciences islamiques, tant par l’ampleur de sa production que par les débats suscités par ses proclamations savantes. Si son œuvre a fait l’objet de nombreuses études, sa contribution au droit musulman des successions ( fiqh al-farāʾiḍ ) demeure rarement examinée de manière autonome. À partir de l’analyse de ses déclarations autobio-graphiques et de l’examen du Šarḥ al-Raḥabiyya , unique commentaire conservé qu’il ait consacré à cette discipline, l’étude adopte une approche circonscrite et contextualisée, fondée sur l’analyse interne d’un corpus juridique limité. L’examen de certaines difficultés interprétatives, notamment dans les commentaires des vers n°57 et n°160 de la Raḥabiyya , met en lumière les effets conjoints de la transmission textuelle, des choix pédagogiques et des contraintes propres aux textes d’initiation. Il en ressort que le Šarḥ al-Raḥabiyya constitue moins une entreprise doctrinale qu’un témoignage des pratiques d’enseignement du droit successoral à la fin du XV e siècle.
Abstract This article examines how classical Shāfiʿī jurists approached the question of human–jinn marriage within a legal system grounded in embodiment and perceptible proof. Jurists discussed beings whose invisibility and shifting forms disrupted foundational legal criteria, such as physical presence, verifiable identity, consent, harm, and kinship legibility. Since the Qurʾan affirms jinn as morally accountable agents, these difficulties could not be resolved by excluding them from the law’s purview. Shāfiʿī jurists developed flexible doctrinal responses that preserved legal coherence within a cosmos populated by diverse moral agents. I argue that human–jinn marriage, far from being an anomaly, functioned as a productive site of legal reasoning that sheds light on how Islamic jurisprudence constructs personhood and adjudicates claims at the boundaries of metaphysics, evidence, and responsibility.
This essay examines a neglected ḥadīth fragment from Kairouan, preserved today at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts in Raqqāda ( milaff 30, rutbī 110 ). Consisting of a modest bifolium transmitting traditions from Sufyān b. ʿUyayna (d. 198/814) through ʿAmr b. Dīnār (d. 126/743-4) and Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742), the manuscript offers a rare insight into the material and social dimensions of early Mālikī scholarship in North Africa. Building on earlier discussions by Joseph Schacht, Miklos Muranyi, and Jonathan Brockopp, this study approaches the fragment not simply as a textual witness but as a material artifact that records the practices through which knowledge was produced, authenticated, and transmitted in fourth/tenth-century Ifrīqiya. Its paratexts—notes of reading, audition, and collation—reveal a network linking Mecca, Qulzum in Egypt, and Kairouan, and they situate the codex within the scholarly milieu of Ibn al-Labbād (d. 333/944) and his disciples. By tracing these transmission practices, the essay argues that the fragment materializes the very processes of learning that shaped Mālikī jurisprudence. Raqqāda 30–110 thus emerges as both a physical remnant and an epistemic model, illuminating how manuscripts served as active agents in the genealogy of knowledge that defined early Islamic intellectual history.
This article analyzes 'ud & umacr;l ledgers from southern Tunisia in the late 19th-century to answer two questions: how useful are they as a source for historical study, and what can they tell us about the role of 'ud & umacr;l in the daily practice of Islamic law? On the first question, I suggest the ledgers are likely a reliable source of history and constitute an untapped archive for an understudied region. I also offer a guide to deciphering their difficult pages. On the second question, I suggest that the function of 'ud & umacr;l in the practice of Islamic law was more significant than previously recognized. Far from being mere judges' assistants, notaries were independent legal practitioners who served broad segments of society with their scribal skills, provided a stable foundation for the enforceability of contracts and the establishment of facts, and likely intervened in the agreements they recorded, educating the parties on the relevant law and helping to resolve disputes.
The Hanafi legal doctrine of territorial status disagreement (ikhtilaf al-darayn) offered a normative framework for regulating the relationship between Muslim political jurisdiction (dar al-Islam) and non-signatory territories. This doctrine addressed the extent to which an individual's inviolability (isma) was contingent upon the political jurisdiction in which they resided. In early and late Hanafi legal texts, ikhtilaf al-darayn led to the nullification of marriage contracts and the proscription of inheritance for subjects living permanently in two different political jurisdictions without treaty agreements. By the 1890s, Ottoman officials, aided by a sultanic firman, disengaged from the legal commitments of the doctrine of ikhtilaf al-darayn. I contend that the influx of foreign subjects into the empire, combined with the formalization of the term ajnabi (foreigner) as a distinct legal status with rights to permanent residency under the protection of the capitulatory regime, disrupted the established juristic categories of `non-Muslim temporary resident' (musta'man) and `non-Muslim permanent protected subject' (dhimmi). This shift paved the way for new legal interpretations. In 1915, the Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam, and in the 1920s, Islamic courts in Egypt, explicitly appealed to principles of public international law particularly the presumption of permanent peace among treaty states to redefine jurisdiction and legal obligation. Taking Egypt as a case study, I demonstrate how Islamic court judges and official muftis drew upon international legal norms to adjudicate questions of nationality and legal protection. Their engagement marked a departure from earlier reliance on ikhtilaf al-darayn, reflecting instead a juridical commitment to a treaty-based legal order founded on coexistence and mutual recognition.
This article analyzes disputes over inheritance between Venetian merchants and Ottoman subjects in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Despite religious prohibitions and the admonitions of ambassadors, Venetians residing in Ottoman cities sometimes married Ottoman Christian women in Islamic courts. If the Venetian husband died in Ottoman territory, the division of his estate might become a source of dispute between his Ottoman and Venetian heirs, leading to a diplomatic controversy. Neither Islamic law nor international agreements (ahidnames) between Venice and the Ottoman Empire provided a clear framework for addressing such controversies. By analyzing two disputes over the estates of deceased Venetians, I demonstrate that the Islamic law of inheritance played a significant role in the emergence of an empire-wide notion of Ottoman state membership in the early modern period.
In this essay, I study interactions between Sharia, antinomian ideas, and the rise of monist cosmology ( waḥdat al-wujūd ) in the Perso-Islamic world in the 13th and 14th centuries. In this era, the Mongol invasions disrupted the established order and introduced tensions between nomadic steppe traditions and Islamic legal norms. Additionally, new antinomian groups such as the Qalandariyya and Haydariyya reportedly contravened various legal codes. At the same time, this was an intellectually groundbreaking era that saw the emergence of new ideas, including those of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). Against this background, Muslim intellectuals were compelled to rethink their cosmologies in light of the prevailing social, political, and intellectual developments. The current essay focuses on two thinkers, one Sunni and the other Shiʿi, who established monism as a distinct school of thought and demarcated its boundaries so that it would not be exposed to the “excesses” of antinomianism: ʿAzīz-i Nasafī (fl. 7th/13th century) and Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. ca. 787/1385). Nasafī developed a peace-centered model of spiritual hierarchy to reduce tensions between the legalistic and spiritual aspects of Islam, while Ḥaydar Āmulī drew extensively on Neoplatonic concepts to formulate universal and correspondence-based hermeneutical models. These two thinkers, thus, developed innovative strategies to reconcile their pioneering monist cosmologies with Islam’s juristic core in the Persianate Mongol world.
This article examines the historical background of the distinction between farāʾiḍ and sunan laws in early Shiʿi hadith literature. Unlike the farāʾiḍ, which are understood as laws that have been decreed by God, sunan are characterized as laws stipulated by the Prophet without any direct divine intervention. The Prophet is entrusted, Shiʿi hadiths suggest, with the authority of legislative delegation (tafwīḍ al-tashrīʿ). In this article I will: (1) analyze hadiths concerning the Prophet’s legislative authority and legal stipulations; (2) examine the emergence of this nomenclature within the intellectual milieu of 2nd/8th century Iraq; and (3) explore the role of intra-Shiʿi debates on the transcendent status of the Imams and their contribution to the discourse on a two-layered sharīʿa, a framework that, within the Shiʿi legal tradition, facilitates the extension of legislative authority to the Imams in the absence of the Prophet.
Originally a post-colonial nationalist project, Islamic Finance became an “alternative” finance offered to pious Muslims before becoming a mainstream type of financial intermediation. Facing a choice between assimilation and identity preservation, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has opted to strengthen the industry by establishing a robust regulatory system, by enacting, in its new Commercial Code, a sub-chapter that clarifies and codifies some essential legal aspects of Islamic Finance transactions. This article examines these amendments within their jurisprudential and historical context, concluding that these amendments assert the identity of the Islamic Finance industry as a representative of the Muslim legal and social tradition, marking a fourth stage in the evolution of Islamic Finance.
