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Books > Law > Other areas of law > Islamic law
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 Palestine, family law is a controversial topic publicly debated
by representatives of the state, Sharia establishment, and civil
society. Yet to date no such law exists. This book endeavors to
determine why by focusing on the conceptualization of gender and
analyzing "law in the making" and the shifts in debates
(2012-2018). In 2012, a ruling on khul'-divorce was issued by the
Sharia Court and was well received by civil society, but when the
debate shifted in 2018 to how to "harmonize" international law with
Islamic standards, the process came to a standstill. These
developments and the various power relations cannot be properly
understood without taking into consideration the terminology used
and redefined in these debates.
The discipline of 'principles of Islamic jurisprudence' ("usul
al-fiqh") constitutes the theoretical basis of Islamic law
("Shari'ah") and the indisputable foundation on which it is based.
One of the most important branches of "usul al-fiqh" is the study
of the usage of language. "Language and the Interpretation of
Islamic Law" is the first work to appear in the English language
dealing with this important aspect of Islamic law. Dr Sukri Husayn
Ramic gives us the background to the terminology used by the
different schools of Islamic law and then discusses the different
applications of language in legal reasoning and the interpretation
of Islamic law.
Pre-modern Western sources generally claim that European mercantile
communities in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed legal autonomy, and were
thus effectively immune to Ottoman justice. At the same time, they
report numerous disputes with Ottoman officials over jurisdiction
("avanias"), which seems to contradict this claim, the discrepancy
being considered proof of the capriciousness of the Ottoman legal
system. Modern studies of Ottoman-European relations in this period
have tended uncritically to accept this interpretation, which is
challenged in this book.
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