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Modern studies of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) have covered several aspects of his thought including historiography, pedagogy, philosophy, economy, urbanism and, most recently, mysticism. However, there remains conspicuously little on the place of the law within his intellectual enterprise despite the fact that the law had played a central role in his career as scholar, teacher, and statesman. This paper reconstructs two expressions of his relationship with the law: his conceptualization of it as a scholar, and his practice of it as a justice administrator. It first examines Ibn Khaldūn's legal training, writings and performance, with close attention to his role as a Mālikī chief judge in Mamlūk Egypt. Then, it probes his perspective on the development of Islamic law and its institutions through a systematic analysis of his account of fiqh and uṣūl al-fiqh in the Muqaddima. The paper concludes that Ibn Khaldūn's narrative fulfills two main tendencies: to contribute a critical analysis of the history of Islamic law, and to represent this history in a novel fashion through his theory of society and culture (ʿilm al-ʿumrān). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fetva collections are important sources for Islamic legal history. However, few scholars have considered a particular collection of fetvas or the fetvas of an individual jurist as specific areas of legal and historical exploration. Instead, most researchers use fetvas selectively and instrumentally, that is in (at best) small groups, and in their explorations of various other topics. This article proposes computational methodologies that could characterize the contents of a 6,000-fetva corpus by an important Ottoman jurist, Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574), to reveal its substantive composition and range. The article conceptualizes a previously uncharted textual space in a way similar to how a map depicts a geographical one. By doing so, it also provides insights into Ebussuud's jurisprudential legacy and the major socio-legal concerns and anxieties in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past is the most important element in the meanings of Islam and its law, but the existing literature has rarely addressed the ways in which Muslims make sense of their past. How and why does the past matter so much for Muslims? Within their past, is it the seventh century that matters for them the most, once it comes to Islamic law, or is it some later period? If the latter, why is that so? This article addresses these questions through an ethno-historical study on the Shāfiʿī Muslims of the Indian Ocean littoral. I argue that a textual longue-durée of Islamic law is what matters to the Muslims more than the scriptures from seventh-century Arabia, or even than the foundational texts of Islamic law from the eighth or ninth centuries. This textual longue-durée is a product of millennium-long legalistic engagements by Muslims not only from Arabia, but also from 'peripheral' places like India and Indonesia. Through juridical and ethical discourses and debates in religious spheres, a rich reservoir of premodern texts is constantly invoked in the mosques, madrasas, markets, and mass media in order to better sustain religious piety and the legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the extent to which reliance on DNA analysis for paternity verification conflicts with the Islamic law of paternity. More particularly, it seeks to examine the extent to which DNA testing can be equated with the classical method of physiognomy (qiyāfa) as its modern equivalent. Depending on whether such a relationship can be drawn, Sharīʿa ruling on the former will be no different from its ruling on the latter. Although the majority opinion of modern Muslim jurists recognizes DNA testing as a reliable scientific method that can be used, to varying degrees, for paternity verification, such recognition is made by appeal to Islamic legal methodology and within the boundaries defined by it. The paper thus illustrates not only the extent to which DNA analysis is legitimized but also the efforts of Muslim jurists to enable the Islamic law of paternity to cope with modern scientific challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the bourgeoning field of Ottoman studies, there remains surprisingly little on the impact of the conquest upon the largest Arabic-speaking province, Egypt, in the long sixteenth century. Although the conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517 ushered in a period of extensive legal reforms, we have yet to fully analyse, classify or quantify the impact of these reforms on law and society in the sixteenth century. While it is widely acknowledged that the reforms triggered opposition from Egyptian ulema, the prevailing view in the secondary literature is that tensions eased soon thereafter. Drawing on al-Damīrīʾs biography of sixteenth-century judges, as well as on Ibn Iyāsʾ well-known chronicle of the conquest, this paper challenges the conventional wisdom on both the duration and substantive consequences of the reforms. The picture that emerges is one which resists the traditional paradigms generally assigned to such conflicts, i.e. ‘juristic orthodoxy’ versus ‘state heterodoxy’. Turning this paradigm on its head, the evidence reveals that the real agent of legal ‘orthodoxification’, understood as a homogenizing, or streamlining process in which correct opinion is emphasized, was the state. Conversely, it is Egyptian jurists, guardians of a legal tradition which emphasized orthopraxy (correct conduct) over and above orthodoxy, who formed a bulwark against it. What is at stake is in this empire-wide debate/conflict is not only the definition and function of qānūn and its relationship to fiqh, as assumed by many, but the very definition of the Sharīʿa itself. As an abstraction of the perfected moral cosmos, the Sharʿa could and did undergo a radical reimagining, producing not only a consciously Ottoman qānūn, but a consciously Ottoman Sharīʿa, to be distinguished from that of rival Sunni powers, past and present. To avoid the conceptual confusion generated by the labels traditionally attached to such matters, the intervention I propose includes an alternative paradigm centered on the notion of ‘antagonistic Sharīʿas’, or antagonistic legal utopias. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]