It is often assumed that as ‘orthodox’ Islam rejects music, Qur’anic recitation (tilawa) and the Call to Prayer (adhan) are its only acceptable melodic practices. By the same logic, the special music of Sufism is bracketed under the labels ‘heterodox,’ or else ‘popular,’ Islam. Both ‘orthodox’ and ‘Sufi’ practices are then categorically distinguished from the ‘secular’ world and its music. This erroneous ‘tripolar’ view of music and religion in Egypt can be ameliorated by considering the rich range of Islamic melodic practices performed there.

During the seasonal pressures of Christmas last year, an order was placed in Amman for an unusually big Bani Hamida rug. The design was determined in the office in Amman, including colors labeled in English abbreviations. After the request was brought to Gebal Bani Hamida, the orders for the appropriate colored wool were sent to the dyers. The women there realized that they did not have the exact shade of yellow requested, but amongst the over three-hundred other colors they did have, they found an approximate replacement. However, they could not make the decision to dye the wool on their own. Instead, they contacted the office in Amman, where their question was noted. Some time later, the designer was informed, and sent back the answer that only the exact tint of yellow would do. So the dyers waited for the stock to be refilled, over the timeliness of which they had little control. The office in Amman complained of the slowness of the work, pressing the women as to why they were behind in filling the order.

The 1990s were not kind to area studies. They were particularly cruel to Middle East specialists, and even more particularly, perhaps, to social scientists. The job market has slumped as relevant departments have lost positions. Departures and retirements were only irregularly replaced. Foundation officers and other officials in other grant-making agencies who promote guidelines and programs stressed thematics, policy-relevance, and cross-cultural comparisons. Publishers came to avoid monographic studies and seemed increasingly allergic to single-country studies (of most countries). Rashid Khalidi’s Presidential Address to the 1994 MESA conference is only the best known of a host of warnings, jeremiads, and even eulogies offered with respect to current prospects for Middle East studies.

Despite the importance of law in societal formations, and what looks like a revival in the field of legal studies, Islamic law is still by and large accessible to only a small group of specialists, and thus cannot claim a large audience even within Islamic and Middle (Near) Eastern studies, not to mention the much broader European and American legal scholarship. There are various reasons for such isolation, which are too complex to enumerate in a summary fashion, but which mostly involve the way the scholarship has evolved in the last few decades in Islamic societies, Europe, and North America, and which reflects the nature of Islamic law. First, unlike Roman law and all the continental codes that followed, and unlike the English and American common-law systems, what is commonly referred to as ‘Islamic law’ does not stand out as an organized set of codes, statutes, or even precedents. Instead, the body of Islamic law, which stretches over many centuries, has spawned several schools known as the madha̱hib, so that a modern scholar who needs to look at the legal framework of, say, an institution of the early ‘Abba̱sid period would have to dig hard into the labyrinth of the fiqh manuals only to realize that layers of interpretations follow each opinion, making it unrealistic to limit the ‘law’ to a set of codified norms. Second, modern scholars tend to look skeptically at the large corpus of Islamic law precisely because of its prescriptive nature and its uncertain historical evolution. We have consequently made little progress in assessing the nature of judicial decisionmaking and how the normative values prescribed by jurists affect it. Third, throughout the twentieth century, the majority of Islamic and Middle Eastern societies have adopted a new set of codes, a process that began in the second half of the previous century with Ottoman reforms, and which for the most part were derived from European civil-code systems. Since the implications of this rupture with the past have attracted little attention from scholars, the relevance of the classical legal systems is the biggest issue of concern here: will the transplanted systems utterly eclipse the various Islamic legal schools, or will there be a revival of the legal schools so as to make up for the inadequacies that result from the civil systems? Indeed, a lot needs to be done before more comprehensively elaborated codes are drafted, in particular in such domains as property, contract, and tort, which, under present conditions, seem like a hybrid mixture of Ottoman feudal practices and modern but poorly implemented Western notions.