Suchergebnisse

Can the concept of law be indiscriminately extended to times and places in which it did simply not exist? Such an extension is at best useless and at worst misleading. Producing an intelligible jurisprudence of the concept of law means keeping it within the reasonable boundaries of its contemporary common-sense understanding: positive law. Parallel to Western societies in which it firstly emerged, the concept of positive law developed in many places, including countries characterized as Muslim. There, it faced other existing normativities, like customs and the Sharia. This book aims, from the Muslim world's perspective, to clarify the uses of the concept of law and the ways of studying it, to describe some of its historical developments, including the ideas of constitutional law, customary law and forensic evidence, and to describe present-day practices, including reference to law sources, rules and interpretation.

The claim of this book is that truth is a matter of language games and practical achievements: it is a "member phenomenon". To document this statement, it proceeds to the investigation of instances of truth-related practices in various Arab contexts. Bearing on the constitution of actions and events, on what is factual or objective, on predictability, consequentiality, intentionality, causality, and on the many ways people orient to them, such a varied set of questions appears thoroughly moral. The praxeological respecification this book undertakes leads to important considerations regarding t

During the 1990s, in Egypt, Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was prosecuted by a group of attorneys and condemned by two courts of the Egyptian national judicial system to be divorced from his wife based on a Civil Code provision forbidding a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man and a literalist reading of the Qur'an which his writings had allegedly breached. In 2021, in Algeria, another university professor, Saïd Djabelkhir, was prosecuted, by attorneys again, and condemned, by a judge of the Algerian national judiciary, based on a Penal Code provision condemning offenses against the teachings of Islam and a non-critical understanding of Islam transforming it into a non-equivocal doctrinal object. Despite nearly thirty years separating the two trials, the same mix of national institutions, legal professions, statutory provisions, reifying reading of religious scriptures, and political stakes – interpreting the law opens the participation in power games – testifies to the deep upheaval of both Islam and law. Nowadays, the law, including the law referring to Islam, is defined by the states, their mostly codified statutes, their courts' case-law, and their personnel, which is trained in positive law, including positive Islamic law, and not in religious sciences, and deals with legal rules accordingly.