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Category: Editorials

Introduces major themes

CALD scientific aspects / Documents: Archives and Collections / Editorials

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A chrono-spatial survey of Arabic legal documents in CALD

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…)

Analysing Islamic law / Editorials

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The jurists’ law: a new framework for an inquiry into Muslim legal thinking

 

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…)

Editorials

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Islamic law as applied law

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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Editorials / Social History through documents

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Arabic legal documents and socio-economic history

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.

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Editorials

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Written documents as legal proof in Islamic law

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.

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