The Lebanese family law system characterized by legal and judicial pluralism controls major aspects of a woman’s rights such as marital, child custody and social rights. While issues of personal status are exclusively left to religious courts and sectarian legislation, it is undeniable that women in Lebanon, are left at the whim of not only an entrenched religious establishment but also cultural norms of patriarchy. Historical practices of Islamic family law issues find little premise in shari’a but rather in the interpretation and implementation thereof. Thus, opening the door to activism and Islamic jurisprudential approach could bring change on religiously delicate issues. In pursuit of gender equality, efforts to reform laws and break the status quo have in certain instances proved successful, yet the transition to a secular personal status law system at the image of Lebanon’s progressive civil society, is far from being reached.

Palestinians fall under a dizzying array of laws and courts, which adjudicate their personal status matters. The specific court or law that applies depends both on the religious/communal identity of the person and the area in which the person lives. Those who are residing in the State of Israel as it existed before 1967 are governed by Israeli laws. The Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have also been under Israeli law since the 1967 Occupation. This chapter concerns the personal status law for those Palestinians who are living in the two other main areas – the West Bank and Gaza. Those living in the West Bank are governed by Jordanian Personal Status Law. Those in Gaza are governed by the Egyptian Law on Family Rights. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the respective family laws will be unified in the near future given political and legislative paralysis in Palestine.

After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Egypt adopted a new constitution in 2014 that strengthened the principle of equality between men and women. In spite of its call on the State to achieve equality in all areas, family law continues to establish significant differences between wives and husbands within the couple. This contribution examines the reforms introduced in Egyptian personal status law since the beginning of the twentieth century and the differences based on gender that remain in both marriage and divorce rights and stresses how governments had to present the reforms as taking place within the shari’a in order to avoid their rejection by conservative religious circles and society.

This chapter explains the role played by reservations, the application of the rules of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and practice in dealing with reservations. It defines reservations and distinguishes them from interpretative declarations and political declarations. It examines whether reservations are permissible or impermissible, including the test whether a reservation is incompatible with the object and purpose of the treaty. It also discusses the rules governing acceptance and objection, the legal effect of reservations, the question whether a prohibited reservation can be severed, and special cases such as human rights treaties, reservations relating to internal law, vague or general reservations, reference to Islamic law, late reservations, and the role of treaty monitoring bodies. It analyses the procedure for making or objecting to reservations or withdrawing them, and the functions of the depositary in relation to reservations.

The article contributes to the unsettling of the Western paradigm of “law and religion,” by examining the overlapping of the two categories in the context of Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian discussions of legality and revelation in the early Abbasid period. With regard to all three legal traditions, the article traces a process of theologization of the law (and minimization of the role of human agency in effecting the content of revelation), on the one hand, and one of textual demarcation and confinement of the law (in line with the principle of “legality”), on the other hand.

The article argues that Sherira, Shāfiʽī and Manuščihr played a particularly significant role in framing and articulating these broad processes, by insisting on the textual confinement of God’s revelation as pronounced at the initial revelatory moment in the Mishnah-cum-Talmud, Hadith, and Zand (alongside the Torah, Quran and Avesta). This, in turn, paved the way for regarding these corpora as the exclusive, complete, and authoritative articulation of the law. Indeed, the parallel diachronic shifts evident in the three religious traditions points to a broader legal-theological turn in the early Abbasid period, which bears significant implications on the history of the dynamics of law and religion.

On the eve of victory in the 1979 revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamists followers discussed blueprints for a new system of Islamic government. Integral to these plans was an emphasis on the new institutions of Islamic shura (local councils) to replace the secular anjumans (local associations) that existed in town and cities. The chapter details Khomeini’s call to establish elected local government in early 1979, months before the new constitution delineating the shape of the new state had been ratified, indicating the significance of the shura. I examine the tensions between the competing visions of shura within the theocratic Islamist camp, by contrasting the views of Khomeini and Mahmoud Taleghani. This chapter also discusses the aborted attempt to hold the first local government elections in the fall of 1979, a factor contributing to the new regime’s reluctance to decentralize government for another decade and a half. The chapter details the multiple and conflicting perspectives on shura during the deliberations leading to the first constitution. The ratified constitution subordinated local and national government (shura and the Majles) to the velayat-e faqih and established a settlement that shaped and constrained the future possibilities and limitations of decentralization in the ensuing decades up to the present day.

A detailed examination of Strauss’s interpretation of Alfarabi’s summary of Plato’s Laws is the subject of Chapter 4. Strauss’s complex article on Alfarabi’s summary, which complements his earlier “Fârâbî’s Plato,” has received minimal attention. The original manuscript of Strauss’s article, found among the Leo Strauss Papers, can substantially improve our understanding of this text and provide the opportunity for a more detailed commentary: The paragraphs of this manuscript are numbered, and contain headings which are absent in the published version of the article. My interpretation of this article will take these aspects of the original manuscript, as well as Strauss’s other writings and correspondence on Alfarabi and his course transcripts, into account.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.

In this chapter, I look at the development of Jewish and Islamic commercial law over the early Islamic centuries to argue that the Islamic "commercial revolution" may be found in the eleventh rather than the eighth century. I argue, therefore, that any migration of Jews westward in the early Islamic centuries was not the result of such a commercial revolution.

In the making of Islam and its laws, a learned community of jurists, authors, teachers and ordinary people intertwined their contributions across geographical and chronological borders. By contesting or undercutting political entities, they asserted the centrality of divine law in the socio-religious lives of humans and advanced the ways in which the law was perceived, practised and discussed. From the formative stages on, texts stood at the forefront of the progress of discussions. For the Shāfiʿī school, diverse transregional stimuluses helped it to survive and spread and occasionally to decay and contract between the ninth and the twentieth centuries. This chapter analyses the pivotal historical elements that enabled the expansion of the Shāfiʿī school, and Islamic law at large, in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean littorals with a focus on individual, collective and institutional circulations from circles of learning. The emphasis here is on the people who participated in and contributed to the circulatory regime from its formative lands to its eventual movements in the oceanic rims, while the next chapter focuses on the texts as such.

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.