A comparative study of Arabic legal documents
Comparative analysis is a new research method for studying the sources of legal practice in pre-modern Islam. The legal documents are the material vestiges of the workings of the judicial system, as they directly reflect the activities of notaries and judges. The importance of the comparative analysis approach lies in the fact that the documents form part of “series” inasmuch as they use the same formulations and authentication signs in each specimen, hence guaranteeing in writing a Muslim’s rights and obligations and the effectivity of the judgments. Surviving specimens even if they are preserved only in small numbers, evidence the particularities of the system where they were issued. However, a comparison of these elements with a corpus of similar specimens from different times and regions will illustrate directly the issues of change and continuity within the common legal tradition we historically refer to as Islamic law. The corpus of authentic documents, written in Arabic, invocating God in the basmala and referring to the witness attestation (šahāda), takes in material dating back to the first century of Islam and up until today.
By comparing the structure and textual elements of this source material, we are able to identify juridical issues in the context of applied law. This is carried out by cutting the text up into sequences and attribute keys, according to the sequence’s specific content. These sequences can then be compared to those in other documents, either in its form of a textual variant, or as an abstract element designated by its key within the document structure. Sequences may contain serial elements or individual information. This method of textual sequencing was first used with the study of Arabic documents from the Jerusalem Ḥaram-collection1 and developed into an analytical method by the European Research Council project Islamic Law Materialized (ILM)2 and the related “Comparing Arabic Legal Documents” (CALD) database.
As historical sources of primary importance, Arabic legal documents from premodern times are dispersed all over the world and are often difficult to decipher and to understand. This has hampered studies in the field and prevented large-scale analyses being carried out. By opening up the CALD database to all researchers and by publishing its research method and documents, we hope to spur research on and to confirm the importance of the legal documents in the study of premodern Islamic law both in theory and practice.
This blog aims to be of value to students and researchers specializing in Islamic law. The blog brings together scientific studies, tools, and raw material gathered from the CALD-database with more than 3,000 legal documents from the 7th to the 16th centuries CE. The database illustrates the innovative approach of how to study these documents in a comparative perspective. As an academic companion to the database’s successive online availability, this blog provides both texts of general interest and comparative in-depth studies and provides an explanation of certain technical aspects of the database.
Christian Müller and Amalia Zomeño
Cite this article as: Christian Müller and Amalia Zomeño, “About: A Comparative Study of Arabic Legal Documents”, in The Documents of Islamic Law. Studies on Arabic Legal Documents, published on 16/02/2021, https://dilih.hypotheses.org/about.
