About the article

In this article, I provide an account of juristic discourses from the fifth/eleventh through tenth/sixteenth centuries on the hypothetical case of a starving person taking another’s food or property across four Sunnī schools of law. Examination of juristic discourses on this hypothetical case of necessity provides insight into an active, creative debate about the ethical parameters of the law, and how this-worldly law interacts with the hereafter law. It also provides insight into how jurists engaged in and debated legal methodology and its application to extreme (and often also, hard) cases. I argue that it was particularly through such hypotheticals of exceptional and hard cases that jurists explored legality, the foundations and limits of the law, and how far the law can respond to fact patterns and social reality while remaining internally systematic. This study thus contributes to our understanding of the history of Islamic law by showing that it is in these factually minimal, yet hard hypothetical cases that the jurists carefully articulated their legal process and interrogated the internal ordering and systematization of the legal system.

The MEI offers regular programing on topics related to Islamic law through its “Sharīʿa Workshop,” a series launched in 2015. The workshop brings together faculty and graduate students from Columbia and other universities in the region for intensive discussions of new research by leading specialists invited from the US and abroad.

The workshop is by invitation only and is based on pre-circulated papers read in advance of the session. Please email amb49@columbia.edu if you wish to be put on the workshop invitation list or receive the papers.