Join us on our next Sharia Workshop with Professor Devin Stewart to discuss the paper “Taqīyah and Tawriyah: Dissimulation and the Art of Ambiguity”

Join us on our next Sharia Workshop with Dr Mariam Sheibani to discuss the paper “A Tale of Two Ṭarīqas: The Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿī Communities in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries”

Join us on our next Sharia Workshop with Dr Ari Schribber to discuss the paper Is There a ‘Jury’ in Islamic Law? The Twelve-Witness Lafīfiyya Testimony in Moroccan Judicial Practice

Join us on our next Sharia Workshop with Professor Samy Ayoub to discuss the chapter The Obscure Appellate:
The Egyptian Islamic Supreme Court, 1898-1955.

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.

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.

In this Shari’a Workshop we will discuss the chapter “Siyāsa, the Forgotten Code” in Khaled Fahmy’s book Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt.

This paper provides insight into the largely unstudied legal history of the three most prominent Gujarati Muslim commercial castes. The assumption that a hallmark of their history has been their legal exceptionalism - the notion that they stood apart from other Indian Muslims by virtue of their place in the colonial legal system or their apathy towards sharia – is rejected. Unaware of this longer genealogy, historians have rooted both the ersatz Muslim identity of the Gujarati Muslim commercial castes and their economic prowess in this supposed legal exceptionalism.

Dr. O'Sullivan’s paper introduces a variety of topics, including the production of the first Islamic legal treatises in Gujarati; the role of the jamaat council in each community as an interpreter and enforcer of 'sharia'; and competing interpretations of Islamic commercial law in three groups conspicuous for their economic success.

In the case of the Memons, he is interested in the relationship between individual jamaats and the ideas of law propounded by the rival Sunni masalik; in the case of the Bohras, the place of medieval Ismaili jurisprudence in the scholarly culture of the jamaat; and in the case of the Khojas, debates between Ismaili and Twelver Khojas over matters of law, hadith, scripture.

Through engagements with Islamic jurists and contemporary scholarship on both the Shari’a and modern state law, this paper is an invitation to raise four questions: (i) What does it mean to study acts of worship (‘ibadat) as an integral part of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh)? (ii) What does their omission tell us about assumptions regarding the categories of law and Shari’a in contemporary scholarship? (iii) To what extent does the inclusion of acts of worship in their relation to social interactions (mu’amalat) entail revisiting the thesis of the Shari’a’s demise in present times? (iv) How have contemporary Islamic scholars revisited the relationship between acts of worship and social interactions as a response to the constitution of “the present” as an epistemic problem for Islamic legal knowledge?

In an innovative study of the Hadith corpus, the early records of statements and actions that, following the Qur’an, represent the second “source” for the Sharia, the authors consider connections between Islamic methods and conceptions and those of contemporary western thought on “testimony."

Join us for the first Sharia Workshop of 2021, with Paolo Sartori, (Austrian Academy of Sciences; Institute of Iranian Studies: Editor, JESHO) on his article: “Between Kazan and Kashghar: On the vernacularization of Islamic Jurisprudence in Central Eurasia.”

Roundtable Discusson: The Ḥawza and the Sharia

Roundtable Discusson: New Work in Sharia

Tribal Villages in Mamluk Palestine: Exploring the Haram Al-Sharif Documents

With Ibrahim Khaled El Houdaiby (PhD Candidate, MESAAS) and Aseel Najib (PhD Candidate, Religion Department).

Power of the Pen: Cadis and their Archives

With Christian Müller, Directeur de Recherche, CNRS, Institute de Recherche et d’Histoire des Texts, Arabic Section

Islamic Legal Studies: A Critical Historiography

with guest convener Omar Farahat, Assistant Professor of Law at McGill University

Imperialist Feminism and Islamic Law

Lena Salaymeh is Associate Professor at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Princeton University. Her research concerns Islamic and Jewish jurisprudence in both historical and contemporary legal systems.

We will discuss Dr. Salaymeh’s precirculated paper. To receive a copy please email amb49@columbia.edu

Working for the government in Early Islamic Jurisprudence

Rob Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam (CSI), IAIS, University of Exeter.  Gleave is currently Principal Investigator of 2 major projects: Understanding Shari’a: Past Present Imperfect Present (www.usppip.eu) and Law and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam (LAWALISI). We will discuss his precirculated paper. To receive a copy, contact amb49@columbia.edu. 

Codifying the Law: The Case of the Medieval Islamic West

The Middle East Institute at Columbia University looks forward to hosting you at its final Sharīʿa Workshop for the spring semester on Thursday, April 27th. We welcome Professor Maribel Fierro who will lead attendees in a discussion on her paper: Codifying the Law: The Case of the Medieval Islamic West.

Islamic Law as a Discursive Tradition. Join the Middle East Institute for its Sharīʿa Workshop entitled: "Islamic Law As a Discursive Tradition" with a case study on court practices using the Islamic equivalent of "best interests of the child" legal principle. Our guest leading a discussion will be Dr. Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim of McGill University.

Justice and Islamic Law: The 'Ulama', Mazalim Courts and Legal Reform in Islamic History. Our workshops regularly feature leading scholars in Islamic Law from across periods and regions for a detailed discussion of their current research. The topic for the October 27th Workshop will be the paper: "Justice and Islamic Law: The 'Ulama', Mazalim Courts and Legal Reform in Islamic History" featuring two esteemed guests who will lead the discussion: