Shari'a is one of the most hotly contested and misunderstood concepts and practices in the world today. Debates about Islamic law and its relationship to secularism and Christianity have dominated political and theological discourse for centuries. Unfortunately, Western Christian theologians have failed to engage sufficiently with the challenges and questions raised by Islamic political theology, preferring instead to essentialize or dismiss it. In Law and the Rule of God, Joshua Ralston presents an innovative approach to Christian-Muslim dialogue. Eschewing both polemics and apologetics, he proposes a comparative framework for Christian engagement with Islamic debates on shari'a. Ralston draws on a diverse range of thinkers from both traditions including Karl Barth, Ibn Taymiyya, Thomas Aquinas, and Mohammad al-Jabri. He offers an account of public law as a provisional and indirect witness to the divine rule of justice. He also demonstrates how this theology of public law deeply resonates with the Christian tradition and is also open to learning from and dialoguing with Islamic and secular conceptions of law, sovereignty, and justice.

The study of Islamic law can be a forbidding prospect for those entering the field for the first time. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar and practitioner of Islamic law, guides students through the intricacies of the subject in this absorbing introduction. The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of Islamic law in its pre-modern natural habitat. The second part explains how the law was transformed and ultimately dismantled during the colonial period. In the final chapters, the author charts recent developments and the struggles of the Islamists to negotiate changes which have seen the law emerge as a primarily textual entity focused on fixed punishments and ritual requirements. The book, which includes a chronology, a glossary of key terms, and lists of further reading, will be the first stop for those who wish to understand the fundamentals of Islamic law, its practices and history.

One of the characteristics of the 'conservative religious revival' movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is the commitment to a scriptural text as the sole source of knowledge, and an insistence on the literal interpretation of this text. However little has been to done to investigate this phenomenon of interpretation which proposes the literal meaning as the only acceptable one. This book fills this gap with respect to Islam, looking both at literal meaning and literalism. The focus is on the tradition of Muslim legal writings: in this literature there exists a complex procedure of how to identify the literal meaning and the role it has in interpreting texts. The author also makes reference to Quranic exegesis (tafsir) and Arabic rhetorical works, since many of the ideas of legal hermeneutics were derived from these cognate traditions of learning. The overall aim is to take an important modern phenomenon (Muslim commitment to the literal meaning of the revelatory texts) and place it in an historical context. The Muslim debates analysed in the book are described through the prism of modern Western linguistic philosophy, and a chronology of the development of Muslim conceptions of literal meaning structures the book.

Food trucks announcing "halal" proliferate in many urban areas but how many non-Muslims know what this means, other than cheap lunch? Here Middle Eastern historians Febe Armanios and Bogac Ergene provide an accessible introduction to halal (permissible) food in the Islamic tradition, exploring what halal food means to Muslims and how its legal and cultural interpretations have changed in different geographies up to the present day. Historically, Muslims used food to define their identities in relation to co-believers and non-Muslims. Food taboos are rooted in the Quran and prophetic customs, as well as writings from various periods and geographical settings. As in Judaism and among certain Christian sects, Islamic food traditions make distinctions between clean and impure, and dietary choices and food preparation reflect how believers think about broader issues. Traditionally, most halal interpretations focused on animal slaughter and the consumption of intoxicants. Muslims today, however, must also contend with an array of manufactured food products - yogurts, chocolates, cheeses, candies, and sodas - filled with unknown additives and fillers. To help consumers navigate the new halal marketplace, certifying agencies, government and non-government bodies, and global businesses vie to meet increased demands fofor food piety. At the same time, blogs, cookbooks, restaurants, and social media apps have proliferated, while animal rights and eco-conscious activists seek to recover halal's more wholesome and ethical inclinations. Covering practices from the Middle East and North Africa to South Asia, Europe, and North America, this timely book is for anyone curious about the history of halal food and its place in the modern world.

This book, first published in 1988, argues that a close inspection of the development of Hanafite law in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods reveals changes in legal doctrine which were not restricted to civil transactions but also concerned the public law. It focuses in particular on the interrelated areas of property, rent and taxation of arable lands, arguing that changes in the relationship between tax and rent led to a redefinition of the concept of landed property, a concept at the very heart of the Islamic legal system. This title will be of particular interest to students of Islamic history.

In this meticulously researched volume, Leonard Wood presents his ground breaking history of Islamic revivalist thought in Islamic law. Islamic Legal Revival: Reception of European Law and Transformations in Islamic Legal Thought in Egypt, 1879-1952 brings to life the tumultuous history of colonial interventions in Islamic legal consciousness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells the story of the rapid displacement of local Egyptian and Islamic law by transplanted European codes and details the evolution of resultant movements to revive Islamic law. Islamic legal revivalist movements strove to develop a modern version of Islamic law that could be codified and would replace newly imposed European laws. Wood explains in unparalleled depth and with nuance how cutting-edge trends in European legal scholarship inspired influential revivalists and informed their methods in legal thought. Timely and provocative, Islamic Legal Revival tells of the rich achievements of legal experts in Egypt who disrupted tradition in Islamic jurisprudence and created new approaches to Islamic law that were distinctively responsive to demands of the contemporary world. The story told bears important implications for understandings of Egyptian history, Islamic legal history, comparative law, and deeply contested and highly transformative interactions between European and Islamic thought.

Imam Nawawi's commentary on Sahih Muslim is one of the most highly regarded works in Islamic thought and literature. Accepted by every sunni school of thought, and foundational in the Shaafi school, this text, available for the first time in English, is famed throughout the Muslim world. After the Qur'an, the prophetic traditions are the most recognised source of wisdom in Islam. Amongst the collected Hadith, Sahih Muslim is second only to the the collection of Imam Bukhari. With a commentary by Imam Nawawi, whose other works are amongst the most widely-read books on Islam, and translated by Adil Salahi, a modern scholar of great acclaim, this immense work, finally available to English readers, is an essential addition to every Muslim library, and for anybody with an interest in Islamic thought.

How do modern Muslims' attitudes to marital violence and patriarchy relate to the Islamic tradition? In recent years, discussion regarding the interpretation of the Qur'an has become highly controversial. Especially contentious is passage 4:34, which covers the legitimacy of marital violence and the subjugation of women within Islam. Scholarly opinion on the topic is heavily influenced by contemporary context, so the issue remains largely unsettled. While pre-colonial Islamic jurists permitted the use of violence against women, they still held ethical concerns about the disciplinary privileges of husbands. Consequently, the debate for these early scholars was focussed on the level of violence permitted, and how to apply the three disciplinary steps: admonishment, abandonment, and physical abuse. Ayesha Chaudhry argues that all living religious traditions are rooted in a patriarchal, social, and historical context, and they need ways to reconcile gender egalitarian values with religious tradition. Post-colonial, modern Islamic scholars that consult the Qu'ran for gender-egalitarian interpretations must confront a difficult and unique debate: equality vs authority. As in many religions, authority is derived from tradition, rebelling from which results in a loss of authority in the eyes of the community. Chaudhry reveals that Muslims do not speak with one voice about Islam. Instead, Muslim scholarly discourse is spirited and diverse. The voices of contemporary Muslim scholars enrich the scope of the 'Islamic tradition'. Many recent works on Islam strive to promote a 'public relations' image of Islam. This book deals with ethical problems of domestic violence as discussed in historic and contemporary Islamic religious doctrine. The stakes are high, and very real. The author confronts the significant issue of how modern Muslims can relate to Islamic tradition and the Qur'anic text.

In recent years the subject of freedom of expression has become a topic of heated debate. "Freedom of Expression in Islam" offers the first and only detailed presentation in English of freedom of expression from both the legal and moral perspectives of Islam. This work is a pioneering attempt in examining both the evidence on freedom of expression in the sources of the "Shari'ah" and the limitations, whether moral, legal or theological, that Islam imposes on the valid exercise of this freedom. "Freedom of Expression in Islam "is informative not only on the subject of the possibilities of freedom of expression within Islam, but also on the cultural tradition of Islam and its guidelines on social behaviour. "Freedom of Expression in Islam" is part of a series dedicated to the fundamental rights and liberties in Islam and should be read in conjunction with "The Dignity of Man: An Islamic Perspective" and "Freedom, Equality and Justice in Islam."

If justice is an intrinsic value in Islam, why have women been treated as second-class citizens in Islamic legal tradition? Today, the idea of gender equality, inherent to contemporary conceptions of justice, presents a challenge to established, patriarchal interpretations of Shari'a. In thought-provoking discussions with six influential Muslim intellectuals - Abdullahi An-Na'im, Amina Wadud, Asma Lamrabet, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Mohsen Kadivar and Sedigheh Vasmaghi - Ziba Mir-Hosseini explores how egalitarian gender laws might be constructed from within the Islamic legal framework.

While scholars have long looked at the role of political Islam in the Middle East, it has been assumed that domestic politics in the wealthy monarchical states of the Arabian Gulf, so-called "rentier states" where taxes are very low and oil wealth subsidizes the needs of citizens, are largely unaffected by such movements. However, the long accepted rentier theory has been shortsighted in overlooking the socio-political role played by Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in the super-rentiers of Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. While rentier state theory assumes that citizens of such states will form opposition blocs only when their stake in rent income is threatened, this book demonstrates that ideology, rather than rent, have motivated the formation of independent Islamist movements in the wealthiest states of the region. In the monarchical systems of Qatar and the UAE, Islamist groups do not have the opportunity to compete for power and therefore cannot use the ballot box to gain popularity or influence political life, as they do elsewhere in the Middle East. But, as this book points out, the division between the social and political sectors is often blurred in the socially conservative states of the Gulf, as political actors operate through channels that are not institutionalized. Simply because politics is underinstitutionalized in such states does not mean that it is underdeveloped; the informal realm holds considerable political capital. As such, the book argues that Brotherhood movements have managed to use the links between the social (i.e. informal personal networks) and political (i.e. government institutions) to gain influence in policymaking in such states.Using contemporary history and original empirical research, Courtney Freer updates traditional rentier state theory and argues that political Islam serves as a prominent voice and tool to promote more strictly political, and often populist or reformist, views supported by many Gulf citizens.

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.

This book by renowned scholar and recognised authority on Islam, Shaykh-ul-Islam Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, is a discourse on the legal position of celebrating the Mawlid al-Nabi (birthday of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)) within Islam. Most notably, the author has comprehensively compiled evidences from the authentic source texts and classical authorities to prove not only the permissibility of celebrating the Mawlid al-Nabi within the bounds of the Shari'a (Islamic Law) but also that it is divinely ordained and was a Sunna (practice) of the Prophet himself. The author presents unique and compelling arguments showing why celebrating Mawlid al-Nabi is not only an act of righteousness, but a need of our time. Tackling the various criticisms of this act head on, he specifically addresses the issue of why the first generation of Muslims did not celebrate the Mawlid, and clarifies that labelling the Mawlid as an bid'ah (innovation) betrays a fundamental and serious flaw in the understand of the Islamic concept of bid'ah.

The relationship between Islamic law and international human rights law has been the subject of considerable, and heated, debate in recent years. The usual starting point has been to test one system by the standards of the other, asking is Islamic law 'compatible' with international human rights standards, or vice versa. This approach quickly ends in acrimony and accusations of misunderstanding. By overlaying one set of norms on another we overlook the deeply contextual nature of how legal rules operate in a society, and meaningful comparison and discussion is impossible.
In this volume, leading experts in Islamic law and international human rights law attempt to deepen the understanding of human rights and Islam, paving the way for a more meaningful debate. Focusing on central areas of controversy, such as freedom of speech and religion, gender equality, and minority rights, the authors examine the contextual nature of how Islamic law and international human rights law are legitimately formed, interpreted, and applied within a community. They examine how these fundamental interests are recognized and protected within the law, and what restrictions are placed on the freedoms associated with them.
By examining how each system recognizes and limits fundamental freedoms, this volume clears the ground for exploring the relationship between Islamic law and international human rights law on a sounder footing. In doing so it offers a challenging and distinctive contribution to the literature on the subject, and will be an invaluable reference for students, academics, and policy-makers engaged in the legal and religious debates surrounding Islam and the West.

A dynamic account of the practice of Islamic law, this book focuses on the actions of a particular legal official, the muhtasib, whose vast jurisdiction included all public behavior. In the cities of Cairo and neighboring Fustat during the Mamluk period (1250-1517), the men who held the position of muhtasib acted as regulators of markets and public spaces generally. They traversed their jurisdictions carrying out the duty to command right and forbid wrong, and were as much a part of the legal landscape as the better-known figures of judge and mufti. Taking directions from the rulers, the sultan foremost among them, they were also guided by legal doctrine as formulated by the jurists, combining these two sources of law in one face of authority. The daily workings of the law are illuminated by the reports of the muhtasib in the vivid Mamluk-era chronicles, which often also captured the responses of the individuals who encountered the official. The book is organized around actions taken by the muhtasib in the areas of Muslim devotional and pious practices; crimes and offenses; the management of Christians and Jews; market regulation and consumer protection; the specific markets for essential bread; currency and taxes; and public order. The case studies presented show that while legal doctrine was clearly relevant to the muhtasib's actions, the policy demands of the sultan were also quite significant, and rules from both sources of authority intersected with social, political, economic, and personal factors to create full and vibrant scenarios that reveal the practice of Islamic law.

Islamic Natural Law Theories offers the first sustained jurisprudential inquiry into Islamic natural law theory. It introduces readers to the central figures in the Islamic natural law tradition and their canonical works, analyzes the historical development of Islamic jurisprudence and explains the major contrasts with Western traditions of natural law.
In popular debates about Islamic law, modern Muslims perpetuate an image of Islamic law as legislated by God, to whom the devout are bound to obey. Reason alone cannot obligate obedience; at most it can confirm or corroborate what is established by source texts endowed with divine authority.
This book shows, however, that premodern Sunni Muslim jurists were not so resolute. Instead, they asked whether and how reason alone can be the basis for asserting the good and the bad, and thereby justifying obligations and prohibitions under Shari'a. They theorized about the authority of reason amidst competing theologies of God and their implications on moral agency. For them, nature became the link between the divine will and human reason. Nature is the product of God's willful creation for the benefit of humanity. Since nature is created by God and thereby reflects His goodness, nature is fused with both fact and value. Consequently, as a divinely created good, nature can be investigated to reach both empirical and normative conclusions about the good and bad. They disagreed, however, whether nature's goodness is a result of God's justice or grace upon humanity, thus contributing to different theories of natural law.
By recasting the Islamic tradition of jurisprudence, the book sheds substantial light on an uncharted tradition of natural law theory, and on the proper understanding of Islamic faith.

This book is the first of its kind to provide a critical overview and theoretical analysis of the Circular Economy from Shariah and Islamic Finance perspectives. The book is divided into three parts. The contributing authors pay close attention to Islamic Finance in light of sustainability and value creation. It also includes case studies on the Circular Economy application in Islamic Finance industry. The book is of interest to academics, students, and practitioners on Islamic Economics and Finance who have an interest in understanding the Circular Economy under the lens of Islamic Finance principles and applications.

This book provides an introduction to the laws of the Middle East, defining the contours of a field of study that deserves to be called 'Middle Eastern law'. It introduces Middle Eastern law as a reflection of legal styles, many of which are shared by Islamic law and the laws of Christian and Jewish Near Eastern communities. It offers a detailed survey of the foundations of Middle Eastern Law, using court archives and an array of legal sources from the earliest records of Hammurabi to the massive compendia of law in the Islamic classical age through to the latest decisions of Middle Eastern high courts. It focuses on the way legislators and courts conceive of law and apply it in the Middle East. It builds on the author's extensive legal practice, with the aim of introducing the Middle Eastern law's main sources and concepts in a manner accessible to non-specialist legal scholars and practitioners alike.
The book begins with an exploration of the depth and variety of Middle Eastern law, introducing the concepts of shari'a, fiqh, and qanun, (which all mean 'law'), and dwelling on Islamic law as the 'common law' of the Middle East. It provides a historical introduction to the contemporary Middle East, exploring political systems, constitutional law, judicial review, the laws of tort and obligations, commercial law (including Islamic banking, company law, capital markets, and commercial arbitration); and examines legislative reform in family law and the position of women in the legal system. The author considers the interaction between Islamic and Western laws and includes a bibliography designed for further research into the jurisdictions and themes explored throughout the book.

Shariah is by now a term that most Americans and Europeans recognize, though few really understand what it means. Often portrayed as a medieval system used by religious zealots to oppress women and deny human rights, conservative politicians, media commentators, and hardline televangelists stoke fear by promoting the idea that Muslims want to impose a repressive Shariah rule in America and Europe. Despite the breadth of this propaganda, a majority of Muslims-men and women-support Shariah as a source of law. In fact, for many centuries Shariah has functioned for Muslims as a positive source of guidance, providing a moral compass for individuals and society. This critical new book by John L. Esposito and Natana Delong-Bas aims to serve as a guide for what everybody needs to know in the conversation about Shariah, responding to misunderstandings and distortions, and offering answers to questions about the origin, nature, and content of Shariah.

This wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. In Fluid Jurisdictions, Nurfadzilah Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. Yahaya explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. To ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law-even against fellow Muslims. Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.

In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In "The Long Divergence," one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions.

Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome.

"The Long Divergence" opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.

Islamic substantive law, otherwise called branches of the law (furA"' al-fiqh), covers the textual provisions and jurisprudential rulings relating to specific transactions under Islamic law. It is to Islamic substantive law that the rules of Islamic legal theory are applied. The relationship between Islamic legal theory and Islamic substantive law is metaphorically described by Islamic jurists as a process of 'cultivation' (istithmAE r), whereby the qualified jurist (mujtahid), as the 'cultivator', uses relevant rules of legal theory to harvest the substantive law on specific issues in form of 'fruits' (thamarAE t) from the sources. The articles in this volume engage critically with selected substantive issues in Islamic law, including family law; law of inheritance; law of financial transactions; criminal law; judicial procedure; and international law (al-siyar). These areas of substantive law have been selected due to their contemporary relevance and application in different parts of the Muslim world today. The volume features an introductory overview of the subject as well as a comprehensive bibliography to aid further research.

This book invokes the Tawhidi ontological foundation of the Qur'anic law and worldview, and is also a study of ta'wil, the esoteric meaning of Qur'anic verses. It presents a comparative analysis between the Tawhidi methodology and the contemporary subject of Shari'ah. Masudul Alam Choudhury brings about a serious criticism of the traditional understanding of Shari'ah as Islamic law contrary to the holistic socio-scientific worldview of the unity of knowledge arising from Tawhid as the law. A bold repudiation of the Islamic traditional understanding and the school of theocracy, Choudhury's critique is in full consonance with the Qur'an and Sunnah. It is critical of the sectarian (madhab) conception of relational independence of facts. Thus the non-creative outlook of Shari'ah contrasts with universality and uniqueness of Tawhid as the analytically established law explaining the monotheistic organic unity of being and becoming in 'everything'. This wide and strict methodological development of the Tawhidi worldview is articulated in this work. The only way that Tawhid and Shari'ah can converge as law is in terms of developing the Tawhidi methodology, purpose and objective of the universal and unique law in consonance with the ontology of Tawhid. Such a convergence in the primal ontological sense of Tawhid is termed as maqasid as-shari'ah al-Tawhid.

British Islam and English Law presents a novel argument about the nature and place of groups in society. The encounter with Islam has led English law to tread a line between two theoretical models, liberal individualism and multiculturalism, competing for dominance over the law of organised religion. This philosophical rivalry has generated a set of seemingly intractable conflicts between individual and community, religion and state, nation and culture. This book resurrects the long-buried theory of classical pluralism to address and resolve these tensions. Applying this to five understudied institutions that give structure and form to British Islam - banks, charities, schools, elections, clans - it outlines and justifies the reforms that would optimise the relationship between law and religion. Unflinching and unorthodox, this book places law and theory in context, employs innovative methods such as nudge theory and applied history, and provides detailed answers to hard questions about British Islam.

British Islam and English Law presents a novel argument about the nature and place of groups in society. The encounter with Islam has led English law to tread a line between two theoretical models, liberal individualism and multiculturalism, competing for dominance over the law of organised religion. This philosophical rivalry has generated a set of seemingly intractable conflicts between individual and community, religion and state, nation and culture. This book resurrects the long-buried theory of classical pluralism to address and resolve these tensions. Applying this to five understudied institutions that give structure and form to British Islam - banks, charities, schools, elections, clans - it outlines and justifies the reforms that would optimise the relationship between law and religion. Unflinching and unorthodox, this book places law and theory in context, employs innovative methods such as nudge theory and applied history, and provides detailed answers to hard questions about British Islam.