The new online version of the CALD database provides a simplified user interface. This facilitates research without losing the advanced functionalities that serve as an analytical tool for the comparative approach to the study of legal documents in Islam. CALD’s new user interface is developed by the IRHT (CNRS) during the years 2022-2024. For a short manual see “Comparing Arabic Legal Documents: How to use the CALD database (version 2024)“.
All over the Islamic world in the medieval period, the courts of law demanded, used, and produced written documents daily. Copies, validations, and certifications of documents were necessary in procedures. Within the wider phenomenon of Muslim archival practices, the preservation of “documents of Islamic law” holds a particular place because they were produced by, and for the use of, courts of law with the intention of safeguarding the individuals’ legal rights and obligations, according to jurists’ law.
Historians love sources and base their studies on them. Historians of Islamic societies are probably no exception. Historical studies are always limited in time and space, something that also applies to “world history studies”. The documents in the CALD database are a first step towards creating a corpus of sources for the study of the practice of Muslim courts, spanning the 8th to 16th centuries from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula. This wide dispersion of legal documents, (more…)
This is a summary of Islamic law’s basic features which proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding historical sources on juridical thinking (fiqh) and legal practices. It benefits from a chronological approach to the legal rulings that Muslim law schools developed, commented on, and transmitted from the 4th/10th to the 13th/19th centuries. (more…)
The comparative analysis of legal documents opens new research perspectives on applied law in premodern Muslim societies, a hitherto neglected aspect in Islamic legal studies. All authentic deeds are relics of applied law as they were issued in real cases for individual persons in order to safeguard their rights or to define their obligations within the legal order of their time.
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Legal documents were the main guarantee for people who went to law to keep their rights intact. Thus, they approached the notaries to have these legal instruments written down. The study of the social and economic history of Islam in premodern times, using the legal documents as the main source, should always have this premise in mind, as it was mainly individuals (and not those working in the legal system) who demanded the writing out of documents. In this sense, as historians, if we bear in mind this agency for the “consumers” of Islamic law, we will foster a more dynamic perspective in the study of Islamic societies.
With the short inventory number (SIN) for each document, CALD uses a specific reference that adapts to the requirement of displaying documents in lists and of mass citations: The SIN combines information on place and holding institution, eventually on particular collections within an institution and the inventory number of each specimen.
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Classifying legal documents by type is a major analytical goal, and CALD provides the research tool “typology” for that purpose. A new typology (March 2020) replaces the earlier version that resulted from the Ḥaram-corpus and the first stage of CALD during the ILM Project (2009-2013).
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Sequence numbers are the backbone of scientific study of legal documents in CALD. They are attributed to each textual sequence according to content (or function), the default value being 660 for non-identified content. As such, they reflect the documents’ content in an abstract form that neglects individual details.
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Most documents encoded in CALD were previously edited in scientific books or articles. One may search for these editions in the “Bibliography” provided in the database. References to an edition in the List of documents published in CALD give a short key: the authors’ name and year of publication.
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