Work on this book began in the academic year 1991-92 when a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided me with release time from teaching to conduct a survey of the Kitāb al-Mi'yār of Ahmad al-Wansharisi. During that year, I prepared draft translations of fatwās that contain transcriptions of legal documents. These translations became the basis of courses on Islamic law that I have taught at Cornell in subsequent years, both in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Law School. I thank the students who participated in these courses for their questions, comments, criticisms, and insights, many of which have helped to shape the final form of the book.

While on sabbatical leave at the Hebrew University in the academic year 1996-97, I taught a graduate-level seminar on Islamic law in which we read several fatwās in their Arabic Originals. Participants in the seminar included Haim Gerber, Aharon Layish, Oded Peri, and Ron Shaham. I could not have asked for a more stimulating intellectual environment in which to work out the meaning and interpretation of the texts that we read together.

A grant from the American Institute for Maghribi Studies made it possible for me to visit Morocco from December 1996 to January 1997, to examine manuscripts of the Mi'yār in the Bibliothèque Générale, and to visit the village of Zgane in the Middle Atlas Mountains, near Sefrou.