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)“.
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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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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This first-time edition of a 14th-century document on endowed shares in two villages, the Upper and the Lower Bayt ʿIṭāb, sheds new light on a rural Mamlūk waqf in the Jerusalem area, its administration and legal situation.
Until recently, academic research considered the use of written documents by qadi courts throughout history as one of the major signs of the disconnection of Muslim legal thinking (fiqh) from applied law. This paradigm of a theory-practice-gap in “Islamic law” was built upon a reduced understanding of fiqh’s procedural laws, which only included oral forms of testimony (šahāda), acknowledgement (iqrār) and judicial oath (yamīn) as potential elements for judicial proof (bayyina), and therefore relegates “writing” (kitāba) to the rank of a mere indicator (dalīl). New important documentary evidence challenges this truism on the rejection of written proof that was first promoted by scholars like Joseph Schacht, Émile Tyan and Robert Brunschvig in the middle of the 20th century and still finds its way into academic publications on Islamic law.
This list includes all the documents that are available in the CALD database or will be published soon. It refers to each document by CALD’s short inventory number (SIN), the hiǧrī-year (AH), typology and to conventional editions. The last two columns refer to a publication by “Meta data” and to the fact that the Arabic text is also included.
This list is regularly updated. To see the latest updates, click here.
