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Drawing on canon studies, this book investigates the origins, development and functions of the core of the Sunni ḥadīth canon, the 'Authentic' ḥadīth collections of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, from the time of their authors to the modern period.

In 1910, al-Mahdi al-Wazzani, a prominent Moroccan Islamic scholar completed his massive compilation of Maliki fatwas. An eleven-volume set, it is the most extensive collection of fatwas written and published in the Arab Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Al-Wazzani's legal opinions addressed practical concerns and questions: What are the ethical and legal duties of Muslims residing under European rule? Is emigration from non-Muslim territory an absolute duty? Is it ethical for Muslim merchants to travel to Europe? Is it legal to consume European-manufactured goods? It was his expectation that these fatwas would help the Muslim community navigate the modern world. In considering al-Wazzani's work, this book explores the creative process of transforming Islamic law to guarantee the survival of a Muslim community in a changing world. It is the first study to treat Islamic revival and reform from discourses informed by the sociolegal concerns that shaped the daily lives of ordinary people. Etty Terem challenges conventional scholarship that presents Islamic tradition as inimical to modernity and, in so doing, provides a new framework for conceptualizing modern Islamic reform. Her innovative and insightful reorientation constructs the origins of modern Islam as firmly rooted in the messy complexity of everyday life.

Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids. The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib investigates the development of legal institutions in the Far Maghrib during its unification with al-Andalus under the Almoravids (434-530/1042-1147).

In Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined—and continues to define today—the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to throw new light on the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth century. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly discovered medieval sources that describe life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, he considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and, not the least, for the highly contentious global environment of today.

The two 'authentic' adith collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim are the most famous books in Islam after the Qur'an - a reality left unstudied until now. Brown charts the origins, development and functions of these two texts through the lens of canonicity.

Abstract This essay aims to provide some analytical foundations for the study of legal pluralism in Muslim-majority colonies. Specifically, we contend that the incorporation of Islamic law into the colonial legal systems should be distinguished from the process of integration and codification of oral customs. As Islamic law constitutes a well-established legal system, based on written traditions and on elaborate institutions of learning and adjudication, its incorporation into the colonial legal system carried with it a number of implications. These are discussed, as are the tripartite relations that often emerge in Muslim-majority colonies between statutory laws, Islamic, and customary laws (ʿādat, ʿurf). The final section of the essay aims to present the articles included in this special issue and to place them within this broad context. Le présent article vise à établir des fondements théoriques à l'étude du pluralisme juridique dans les colonies à majorité musulmane. Il insiste en particulier sur la nécessité qu'il y a à distinguer l'incorporation de la loi islamique aux systèmes juridiques coloniaux, du processus d'intégration et de codification du droit coutumier non écrit. La loi islamique constitue un système bien établi, fondé sur des traditions écrites et pourvu d'institutions de formation et d'exercice complexes. Son incorporation au sein du système juridique colonial a entraîné un certain nombre de conséquences spécifiques, qui sont analysées ici. Une attention particulière est en outre accordée aux relations triangulaires qui se font jour entre loi statutaire, loi islamique et droit coutumier (ʿādat, ʿurf) dans les colonies à majorité musulmane. Enfin, la dernière partie est consacrée à la présentation des articles réunis dans le numéro spécial dédié à ces enjeux.

Drawing on legal and ḥadīth texts from the formative and classical periods of Islamic legal history, this book offers an overview of the development of the questions prominent jurists asked and answered when they thought about women's issues.

As the French conquered Muslim lands in their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century quest for empire, they encountered multiple and sometimes mixed judicial systems among the native populations. In many places, legal codes were shaped by either fiqh, meaning Islamic law, one component of which is customary law, or by non-Islamic custom, or some combination of the two. To administer native justice in French colonies and protectorates, officials sorted through this multiplicity in order to standardize procedures, principles, and punishments. The standardization of customary law codes, whether written or oral prior to submission to the makhzan (the central Moroccan government, lit. “storehouse”) under the Protectorate, required that French officials both maintain pre-contact codes and create new institutions to administer and monitor them. Through new judicial bureaucracies, the French transformed indigenous law. Customary law was a “residual category” in the sense that it consisted of what remained after colonial powers ferreted out what they considered morally offensive and politically objectionable. Legal codification involved what Vincent calls “a compromise between those recognized as leading elements in indigenous societies and the colonial administrators who co-opted them.” Yet customary law, “if understood as allowing local people to do their own cultural ‘thing,’ should also be understood to have been a carefully restricted fragment of ‘tradition.’” This tradition when manifest as customary law “implies that there is a different kind of law with which it can be contrasted,” making customary law “the ongoing product of encounters between subordinate local political entities and dominant overarching ones.” In such encounters the distinction made between custom and law has long preoccupied legal historians, as well as anthropologists, colonial administrators, and importantly, lay people. Throughout French African colonies and protectorates, this distinction was key to the French usurpation of social institutions, as was true in British overseas territories as well.

This article analyses the internal dynamics of online Islamic legal discourses embedded in their offline and multimedia contexts that use of a rich repository of legal texts composed over a period of about a thousand years. Through their vigorous and spirited engagements with these historical texts, contemporary Islamic jurists simultaneously create new digital platforms in mass and social media to disseminate their ideas. In so doing, they perpetuate a long textual legal tradition through hypertext commentaries and super-commentaries. The premodern texts are thus reborn through new forms of ḥāshiyas such as audio commentaries, video commentaries, audio-video commentaries and hypertext commentaries. These new developments from the age of new media contribute to the textual longue-durée of Islamic law. Tracking the peregrinations of three Islamic legal texts in the mass media and cyber world, I argue that the dissemination of premodern Islamic legal texts via cyber space has resulted in the “democratization” of a knowledge-system that was previously dominated by trained fuqahā and affiliated institutional structures and has enlivened the traditional school affiliations.