This chapter focuses on several short biographies excerpted from Persian Shīʿī biographical dictionary Rayḥānat al-Adab fī Tarājim al-Maʿrūfīn bi-l-Kunyā wa-l-Laqab (‘The Sweet Basil of Learning, concerning the biographies - tarājim - of the well-known, ordered by teknonym and nickname’) by the modern author Mīrzā Muḥammad Mudarris Khayābānī (d. 1373/1954). The work as a whole contains 4,624 biographies, arranged, alphabetically, but also by the various naming methods in Arabic. The selection presented in this chapter provides the reader with examples of unremarkable biographical entries, in the sense that the scholars are not controversial or problematic for the tradition in the view of the biographer.

This chapter explores several legal opinions (pl. fatāwa) from the minority theological and legal tradition known as Ibāḍism, as represented by the work of the modern Ibāḍī jurist Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ (d. 1401/1981). The Ibāḍiyya are usually regarded as the inheritors of the early Khārijite movement and are thus neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī. Important Ibāḍī communities are today found in Oman and in smaller numbers in North Africa (Jerba Island in Tunisia, the Jabal Nafūsa mountains of Libya and the M’zab valley in Algeria). Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ was the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Ibāḍī Rennaisance’ (al-Nahḍa al-Ibāḍiyya) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Ibāḍī community in M’zab sought to find a place for themselves in their Sunnī-dominated environment, leading to an upsurge of Ibāḍī legal and theological scholarship. The fatwās excerpted here discuss the lawfulness of television and radio, eating the meat of non-Muslims, Pepsi and Coca Cola, smoking and various drugs.

This chapter explores the purity and licitness of a range of foodstuffs as discussed in the al-Mabsūṭ of the seminal Twelver jurist and theologian Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067). The chapter contextualises these discussions in terms of the author’s views on legal theory. The criteria for distinguishing clean from unclean foodstuffs, the discussion of their ritual purity and the frequent reference to considerations of custom (ʿurf), evidence an underlying concern with the need to adapt legal rulings to changing circumstances. Al-Mabsūṭ is partly an attempt to respond to Sunnī arguments that Twelver legal reasoning was unsystematic and innocent of the subtleties of legal theory. Throughout the Mabsūṭ, al-Ṭūsī does not name his sources but prefers to refer to the ‘majority’ of scholars, the ‘minority,’ ‘some’ jurists and various anonymous ‘opponents.’ This comparative aspect is an important feature of the work.

This chapter discusses extracts from the multifaceted legal handbook of the Cairene polymath Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Bahādur al-Zarkashī (d. 794/1392), al-Manthūr fī-l-Qawāʿid. It is a versatile work exploring a number of technically involved legal topics that demonstrates the scholarly virtuosity of its author. Throughout this work al-Zarkashī presents a fascinating conceptualisation of Islamic law. Unlike jurists from earlier eras, he is relatively unconcerned with the fields of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) and substantive legal doctrine (furūʿ al-fiqh). He focuses, instead, on the organisation of legal information, a variety of legal question games (including but not limited to riddles), and legal history. His discussion is reflective of trends in the scholarship of Islamic law in 14th century Mamluk Cairo, where a variety of different legal genres were prioritised and riddles and difficult questions were valued as part of the social performance of Islamic legal knowledge.

This chapter focuses on two Ethiopian Sharīʿa court decisions related to divorce initiated by the wife (khulʿ) with a focus on the amount and kind of compensation which a wife must pay to the husband in order to terminate the marriage. Sharīʿa courts have a long history in Ethiopia, where Muslims constitute some 30-35% of the population. In the present federal constitution of Ethiopia, the power of Sharīʿa courts to adjudicate disputes is subject to the precondition of ‘consent’ of the disputing parties. The first case presented in this chapter concerns an appeal by the husband for an increased amount of compensation than that decided by lower courts. The second case concerns the court’s decision to accept the decision of family arbitrators to order a wife to pay compensation for the ‘moral damage’ caused to husband by the wife’s demand for divorce.

This chapter explores a 2011 Egyptian court case of marriage authentication (ithbāt al-zawāj). Such requests are often filed when the registration of the marriage contract has failed, or in cases in which one party denies the existence of marriage. The text translated in this chapter shows the methods used by judges to fill gaps in the law. The broader historical context is the transformation of Egypt from the 19th century onwards, which period witnessed the emergence of a centralised and hierarchical legal system and the promulgation of law codes inspired by French law, which effectively marginalised Islamic law and its practitioners, a process that continued throughout the 20th century.

This chapter concerns a 2005 Malaysian court case in which the plaintiff defaulted on home-purchasing loan and then claimed he could obtain favourable repayment terms if he switched his borrower from Affin (Islamic) Bank to a regular commercial bank. According to the local regulatory framework, all commercial transactions, including those of Islamic banks, fall under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. The government issued a specific law - namely the Islamic Banking Act 1983, later enhanced as the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 - to regulate the Islamic banking and financial industry. As Malaysia practises a dual banking system, whereby Islamic banking products are offered side by side with the conventional ones, the case presents interesting comparison between the two banking products.

This chapter explores the seminal contribution to Islamic legal theory of al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), focusing on his defence of legal analogy (qiyās) against its detractors in al-Mustaṣfā min ʿIlm al-Uṣūl. Al-Ghazālī discusses the justifications for analogy and bases its authority on revelation, rather than reason alone. He opposes both those who deem it rationally impossible to employ analogy in legal matters (against the Baghdādī Muʿtazila and the Shīʿa) and also those who deem it rationally necessary (such as the Baṣran Muʿtazilīs). His position is thus typically an Ashʿarī one: by showing that it is neither impossible nor necessary to use analogy, reason concludes that it is possible to use analogy. This discussion of a point of legal theory is thus heavily inflected by theological debates.

Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.

Based on discursive analysis, Chapter 3 focuses on the briefs produced in Madrid and the colony to mount the plaintiffs’ case for collective freedom. It examines the meanings of freedom in the Spanish Atlantic and the battery of legal tools, including the rarified one of prescription, deployed in the plaintiffs’ memorials to buttress their case of wrongful enslavement and collective freedom. The case entered unchartered terrain with the claim that belonging to a pueblo constituted a way of enacting and producing freedom collectively, an innovative claim based on notions of corporate belonging in the Spanish Atlantic world especially related to municipal bodies such as pueblos. The chapter parses a distinction between civil and political freedom made in some briefs. Civil freedom was understood in opposition to slavery as personal freedoms that free subjects could enjoy as royal vassals even in the context of colonialism and royal absolutism. Political freedom depended on municipal belonging, the space in which limited self-rule and citizenship could be locally enacted in an absolute monarchy. The chapter draws out the possible normative implications of this claim for Afro descendants at large who, at most, could only enjoy civil freedom rights in the empire.

This chapter discusses an ijāza (a qualificatory ‘license’) given in 1215/1800 by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Jalālī to a pupil named ʿAbd al-Qādir b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāshidī al-Muʿaskarī. The granter of the license was a major scholar in late 18th century Algiers, who had been appointed by Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān, the Bey of Algiers (r. 1766-1791), as director of the newly founded Madrasa Muḥammadiyya. The ijāza translated in this chapter illustrates many of the common features of an ijāza document. Aside from the usual prayers and salutations (to God, the Prophet, his family and the Companions), there is an extended exposition of the superiority of religious knowledge and the position of the ʿulamāʾ in Muslim society, as well as a brief introduction to the skills and qualities of the ijāza recipient. The author notes that the awardee had attended his classes, and emphasises that the awardee’s learned qualities had impressed him. The genealogies of both the ijāza donor, and the ijāza recipient are also clearly important, as they are noted with care.

This chapter discusses the section on rebellion from the Radd al-Muḥtār of the Damascene Ottoman muftī Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1252/1836), with remarks on how social reality features in juristic texts, in this case the meteoric rise and destruction of the first Wahhābī state. The major theme of the extract is baghy (rebellion), and the correct response to it. Ibn ʿĀbidīn draws on centuries of Ḥanafī legal thought and carefully distinguishes brigands from rebels with a legitimate cause. In 1801, Mecca was invaded by the followers of the Wahhābī movement. By putting an end to the delivery of the Friday sermon in the name of the Ottoman sultan and barring Muslims from Ottoman lands from performing the pilgrimage, the Wahhābīs proclaimed the dawn of a new order in this, the holiest of cities. Ibn ʿĀbidīn, though by no means distinctive in designating the Wahhābīs Khārijites, is nevertheless interesting for his choice to address them in the chapter on rebellion. By doing so, he deploys an existing category of fiqh literature to evaluate a phenomenon of his own time.

This chapter discusses and translates the Kitāb al-Umma or Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna, also known as the ‘Umma-document’ or the ‘Constitution of Medina,’ exploring its place in modern historiography and in particular its controversial possible implications for the study of the emergence of Islam as a distinct religious tradition. The Kitāb al-Umma is one of the oldest documentary sources of Islamic history, and its historicity is almost universally accepted in modern scholarship. The Kitāb belongs to the period shortly after the migration (hijra) of the Prophet to Medina, specifically to c. 1/622, when the Prophet concluded a series of treaties between the Emigrants (muhājirūn), the Helpers (anṣār), and the main Arab and Jewish tribes of Medina, to establish one Umma, ‘a community of believers.’

This chapter explores a 1912 legal opinion (fatwā) by the Iranian Twelver Shīʿī jurist Muḥammad Ḥusayn Fishārakī (d. 1353/1935) on a dispute over the ownership of two villages, Jayshī and Saryān, both of which were endowed and had been illegally sold by a trustee in order to escape his various financial troubles. The fatwā upholds the legitimacy of the endowments (sing. waqf) and finds that their sale had been unlawful. The source sheds light on how Islamic law in modern and early modern Iran often operated outside the context of state institutions.

This chapter discusses a treatise written by the Zaydī Imam al-Mutawakkil Bi-llāh Aḥmad b. Sulaymān (r. 532-566/1137-1170) or his judge Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad b. Abī Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd al-Salām (d. 573/1177-8) defending the Imam’s conduct on a range of issues which had attracted the vocal criticism of his opponents, particular the group known as the Muṭarrifiyya. Firstly, the treatise seeks to justify hiring ‘immoral’ military forces in a just war; in this case, non-Zaydī, nominally Ismāʿīlī or Sunnī, tribal forces, against fellow Zaydīs. Secondly, the treatise seeks to justify the use of violence as means to collect the maʿūna, a type of religiously justifiable war contribution tax. Relying on non-Zaydī mercenaries against his own Zaydī subjects, and seizing the war tax by force, engendered profound disagreement, sparking off criticism that required a comprehensive response.