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.
Only two items in CALD bear the typology 49933 as they derive from a very specific legal procedure that only took place in Granada after the Conquest in 1492 by the Castilian authorities using Arabic. This two items were preserved in the collection of Arabic documents in the Archivo Municipal de Granada. The structure of both items is clearly that of a question on the validity of the Arabic text written down in the recto of the paper, dated in Rabī‘ II 904/August 1499.
This collection of ten documents was preserved because it forms part of a report on a lawsuit between Alonso de Cáceres and the Municipality of Granada after 1492. Alonso de Cáceres bought several immovable properties from the Muslims of Granada, but the authorities of the city required them to “Christianize” the city and open a new square. Mainly written after the conquest of Granada, these documents show the conventions of the notaries of Granada and the application of Islamic law under Castilian rule.
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