Legal issues of personal status including those implicating women's rights continue to be a focal area of shari'a judicial practice in the Muslim world. Changing ideas of marriage, relations between the spouses, divorce, and the rights of divorcees and widows challenge the courts around the Arab world. In this context, the areas that came under the Palestinian Authority in 1994 command particular attention: the particular political and socio-economic circumstances that surround Palestine's progress toward full statehood have created a remarkable crucible for the synthesis of a new family law in the Arab world.
This rigorous study of the interpretation and application of personal status law in the Palestinian West Bank (and to a lesser extent in the Gaza Strip) is the most extensive yet attempted. It presents a systematic analysis of the application of Islamic family law in nearly 10,000 marriage contracts, 1000 deeds of talaq (unilateral divorce) or khul' (divorce with renunciation), and 2000 judicial rulings over a time span that includes Jordanian rule and Israeli military occupation, updating this with material from the beginning of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Taken into account are the sources of law used in the shari'a courts of the West Bank: the successive codes of family law (the Jordanian Law of Personal Status 1976 and its predecessor the Jordanian Law of Family Rights 1951), and traditional Hanafi rules and texts, along with commentaries by prominent contemporary shari'a scholars and Appeal Court decisions as well as the amendments and modifications being sought by civil society actors (notably women's groups) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well asin Jordan.

Whilst other works exist which examine the Islamic law of personal status, this is the first to set out in a single volume the laws relating to marriage and divorce in the Arab states, both codified and uncodified, in a manner which will enable the reader to look up the provisions of the law in specific areas and, where required, to compare the positions of the laws of different countries.

Although often neglected in the literature on Islamic law, contemporary Indonesia is an especially rich source of insight into the diverse understandings and uses of the Islamic legal tradition in the modern world. Indonesian Muslims are engaged in vibrant and far-reaching debates over the terms, relevance, and developmental limits of Islamic law, and Indonesia is home to a variety of dynamic state and non-state institutional structures for the generation and application of Islamic doctrine. The essays in this volume provide focused examinations of the internal dynamics of intellectual and institutional elements of Islamic law in modern Indonesia in its recent formations. The first five chapters address issues relating to Islamic legal theory, both its historical development over the past century and analysis of the work of specific groups of contemporary scholars, jurists, and activists. The final seven chapters contain studies of more concrete manifestations of Islamic law in modern Indonesia, including court systems, positive law, the drafting of new "Islamic" legislation, and contemporary debates over the implementation of the Shari'a. Taken together these essays offer a series of substantive introductions to important developments in both the theory and practice of law in the world's most populous Muslim society.

A formidable array of judicial talent considers all aspects of Islamic criminal procedure with the firm emphasis on its practical application today in modern states. Where do Islamic courts operate in the modern world? What training does an Islamic judge receive? How does an Islamic court deal with a criminal case? What proof and evidence does it accept? What law and practice do the Islamic judges apply to transgressions by Westerners in Saudi Arabia, whether they be accused of murder, adultery or drinking alcohol? This book attempts to answer all these and many more crucial questions of Islamic law as they affect the different nations of the Islamic World.

An exploration of family law as it pertains to women with regard to marriage, divorce and inheritance in the Middle East. This second edition is revised to expand and update coverage of family law reforms that have taken place throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. It focuses on the historical and legal context for reform, and the methodology and extent of contemporary legal trends, particularly in Egypt and Pakistan.

In Quest of Justice provides the first full account of the establishment and workings of a new kind of state in Egypt in the modern period. Drawing on groundbreaking research in the Egyptian archives, this highly original book shows how the state affected those subject to it and their response. Illustrating how shari'a was actually implemented, how criminal justice functioned, and how scientific-medical knowledges and practices were introduced, Khaled Fahmy offers exciting new interpretations that are neither colonial nor nationalist. Moreover he shows how lower-class Egyptians did not see modern practices that fused medical and legal purposes in new ways as contrary to Islam. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Islam and modernity.

Rights and Civilizations, translated from the Italian original, traces a history of international law to illustrate the origins of the Western colonial project and its attempts to civilize the non-European world. The book, ranging from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, explains how the West sought to justify its own colonial conquests through an ideology that revolved around the idea of its own assumed superiority, variously attributed to Christian peoples (in the early modern age), Western 'civil' peoples (in the nineteenth century), and 'developed' peoples (at the beginning of the twentieth century), and now to democratic Western peoples. In outlining this history and discourse, the book shows that, while the Western conception may style itself as universal, it is in fact relative. This comes out by bringing the Western civilization into comparison with others, mainly the Islamic one, suggesting the need for an 'intercivilizational' approach to international law.

The importance of the rule of law is universally recognised and of fundamental value for most societies. Establishing and promoting the rule of law in the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, has become a pressing but complicated issue. These states have Muslim majority populations, and the religion of Islam has an important role in the traditional structures of their societies. While the Muslim world is taking gradual steps towards the establishment of rule of law systems, most Muslim majority countries may not yet have effective legal systems with independent judiciaries, which would allow the state and institutions to be controlled by an effective rule of law system. One important aspect of the rule of law is freedom of expression. Given the sensitivity of Muslim societies in relation to their sacred beliefs, freedom of expression, as an international human rights issue, has raised some controversial cases. This book, drawing on both International and Islamic Law, explores the rule of law, and freedom of expression and its practical application in the Muslim world.

Winner, 2018 CCCC Outstanding Book Award Sulh is a centuries-old Arab-Islamic peacemaking process. In Shades of Sulh, Rasha Diab explores the possibilities of the rhetoric of sulh, as it is used to resolve intrapersonal, interpersonal, communal, national, and international conflicts, and provides cases that illustrate each of these domains. Diab demonstrates the adaptability and range of sulh as a ritual and practice that travels across spheres of activity (juridical, extra-juridical, political, diplomatic), through time (medieval, modern, contemporary), and over geopolitical borders (Cairo, Galilee, and Medina). Together, the cases prove the flexibility of sulh in the discourse of peacemaking-and that sulh has remarkable rhetorical longevity, versatility, and richness. Shades of Sulh sheds new light on rhetorics of reconciliation, human rights discourse, and Arab-Islamic rhetorics.

The central question of the Arab Spring - what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East - has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations' secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In "Questioning Secularism", Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts - the last courts in Egypt to use Shari'a law - Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism's dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, "Questioning Secularism" lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.

The family is where legal rules presented as part of the Islamic shari`a are most widely applied in the Muslim world. This connection, often differently elaborated by particular social constituencies, can present difficulties to the advocates of law reform. At the same time, the resonance of the issues at which advocacy is targeted creates an opportunity for creative exchange in addressing practical strategies for change. This volume explores the present-day realities of Islamic family law, with particular emphasis on the rights of women, and focusing on law in its living social context as reflected in public opinion and personal experience. A concluding study ranges further afield in order to explore the challenges and potential of 'principles of shari`a' in advocacy on the question of violence against women. This book makes possible a detailed examination of possibilities of, and constraints on, legal reform in the area of Islamic family law in specific contemporary contexts.

The title of Susan Hirsch's study of disputes involving Swahili Muslims in coastal Kenya reflects the image of gender relations most commonly associated with Islamic law. Men need only "pronounce" divorce to resolve marital conflicts, while embattled and embittered wives must persevere by silently enduring marital hardships. But Hirsch's observations of Islamic courts uncover how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform their domestic lives, achieving victories on some fronts but reinforcing their image as subordinate to men through the speech they produce in court.
"Pronouncing and Persevering" focuses closely on the language used in disputes, particularly how men and women narrate their claims and how their speech shapes and is shaped by gender hierarchy in postcolonial Swahili society. Based on field research and court testimony, Hirsch's book debunks the conventional view that women are powerless under Islamic law and challenges the dichotomies through which Islam and gender relations are currently understood.

This book considers the transmission of the Sunna through the lens of the great Madinan legal scholar, Imam Malik ibn Anas (d. 179 AH/795 CE), in his renowned book al-Muwatta', or 'The well-trodden path'. It considers not only the legal judgements preserved in this book, but also the key scholars involved in the transmission of these judgements, namely, Malik's teachers and students. These different transmissions provide very strong evidence for the reliability of Malik's transmission of the Sunna. Overriding these textual considerations is the concept of 'amal, or the Practice of the People of Medina. This is accepted as a prime source by Malik and those following him, but is effectively rejected by the other schools, who prefer hadith (textual reports) as an indication of Sunna. Given the contested nature of 'amal in both ancient and modern times, and the general unawareness of it in contemporary Islamic studies, this source receives extended treatment here. This allows for a deeper understanding of the nature of Islamic law and its development, and, by extension, of Islam itself.

Armed non-state actors (ANSAs) often have economic aims that international law needs to respond to. This book looks at the aim of Islamic State to create an effective government, with an economically independent regime, which focused on key oilfields in Syria and Iraq. Having addressed Islamic State's quest for energy resources in Iraq and Syria, the book explores the lawfulness of the war with Islamic State from a variety of legal aspects. It has been attempted to make inroads into the most controversial aspects of contradictions in the application of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, particularly when discussing the use of extraterritorial armed force against ANSAs, and the obligation to protect civilian objects, including the natural environment. The question is whether the targeting of energy resources should be regarded as a violation of the laws of armed conflict, even though the war with Islamic State being classified as a non-international armed conflict. Ambitious in scope, the study argues that legal theory and state practice are still problematic as to how and under what conditions states can justify resorting to military force in foreign territory, and to what extent they can target natural resources as being part of state property. Furthermore, it goes on to examine the differences between international and non-international armed conflicts, to establish whether there is any difference in the targeting of energy resources as part of the war-sustaining capabilities of either party. Through an examination of the Islamic State case, the book offers a comprehensive study to close the gaps in jus in bello by contextualising the questions of civilian protection, victimisation and state responsibility by evaluating the US's war-sustaining theory as a justification for the destruction of a territorial state's natural resources that are occupied by ANSAs.

Should an employee be allowed to wear a religious symbol at work? Should a religious employer be allowed to impose constraints on employees' private lives for the sake of enforcing a religious work ethos? Should an employee or service provider be allowed, on religious grounds, to refuse to work with customers of the opposite sex or of a same-sex sexual orientation? This book explores how judges decide these issues and defends a democratic approach, which is conducive to a more democratic understanding of our vivre ensemble. The normative democratic approach proposed in this book is grounded on a sociological and historical analysis of two national stories of the relationships between law, religion, diversity and the State, the British (mainly English) and the French stories. The book then puts the democratic paradigm to the test, by looking at cases involving clashes between religious freedoms and competing rights in the workplace. Contrary to the current alternative between the "accommodationist view", which defers to religious requests, and the "analogous" view, which undermines the importance of religious freedom for pluralism, this book offers a third way. It fills a gap in the literature on the relationships between law and religious freedoms and provides guidelines for judges confronted with difficult cases.

The practice of petitioning the Ottoman Sultan was a well-known institution which existed in one form or another throughout Ottoman history and enabled Ottoman subjects, far from the capital of Istanbul, to convey their grievances directly to the supreme ruler. Here, Yuval Ben-Bassat examines the petitions, including many previously unpublished ones, sent during the last decades of the Empire to the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II. The petitions enable Ben-Bassat to explore Palestine's history in this formative period from a unique perspective, providing first-hand accounts of the dilemmas, struggles, acts, concerns, schisms and transformations Palestinian society experienced. Petitioning the Sultan will be of great interest to a broad audience of specialists studying the history of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Palestine's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world.

This book seeks to interrogate the classical fiqh formulation on gender and homicide with a view to exploring further the debate on whether the so-called gender injustice in Islamic law is a human creation or attributable to the divine sources of the Qur'an and Sunnah. The study is in response to the increasing criticism of the Islamic criminal law regime and the accusation that it discriminates on the basis of gender. It argues that any attempt to critique a religious question through the lens of traditional Western human rights ideals would be resisted by the vast majority of Muslims. An examination of the question and any suggested solutions offered would be much more effective if situated within the system they identify with; that is to address the question of gender justice deficit from within the Islamic legal tradition. Focusing on Nigeria and Pakistan, the book achieves this by drawing on classical fiqh literature, contemporary literature, legislative sources and relevant case law.

Scholars, thinkers, and activists around the world are paying increasing attention to a legal reform method that promises to revolutionize the way people think about Islamic law. Known as "The Objectives of the Shari'a" (maqasid al-shari'a), the theory offers a way to derive and apply new Islamic laws using an ancient methodology. The theory identifies core objectives that underlie Islamic law, and then looks at inherited Islamic laws to see whether they meet those objectives. According to the maqasid theory, historical Islamic laws that meet their objectives should be retained, and those that do not-no matter how entrenched in practice or embedded in texts-should be discarded or reformed. Recently, several scholars have questioned the maqasid theory, arguing that it is designed not to reform laws, but to support existing power structures. They warn that adopting the maqasid wholesale would set the reform project back, ensuring that inherited Islamic laws are never fully reformed to agree with contemporary values like gender-egalitarianism and universal human rights. The Objectives of Islamic Law: The Promises and Challenges of the Maqasid al-Shari'a captures the ongoing debate between proponents and skeptics of the maqasid theory. It raises some of the most important issues in Islamic legal debates today, and lays out visions for the future of Islamic law.

The doctrine of modern law of the sea is commonly believed to have developed from Renaissance Europe. Often ignored though is the role of Islamic law of the sea and customary practices at that time. In this book, Hassan S. Khalilieh highlights Islamic legal doctrine regarding freedom of the seas and its implementation in practice. He proves that many of the fundamental principles of the pre-modern international law governing the legal status of the high seas and the territorial sea, though originating in the Mediterranean world, are not a necessarily European creation. Beginning with the commonality of the sea in the Qur'an and legal methods employed to insure the safety, security, and freedom of movement of Muslim and aliens by land and sea, Khalilieh then goes on to examine the concepts of the territorial sea and its security premises, as well as issues surrounding piracy and its legal implications as delineated in Islamic law.