Suchergebnisse

I examine here three short fatwās that were issued in the Islamic West in connection with divorce disputes. The first two cases took place in the sixth/twelfth century, one in Lisbon, the other in the vicinity of Ceuta; the third case took place in Bijāya in the ninth/fifteenth century. In all three cases, the female protagonist finds herself in an unwanted marriage. In the ensuing litigation, each woman uses her own knowledge of the law or knowledge acquired from a male relative or acquaintance to work the system in an effort to extricate herself from an undesirable situation. In order to overcome the asymmetry of the laws of divorce and to achieve her objective, each woman is compelled to engage in some form of deceit and/or prevarication.

In this essay I reconstruct a dispute that occurred in the middle Maghrib during the first half of the eighth/fourteenth century among members of a wealthy family with strong ties to the state. The pre mortem transfer of shares of a mill to minor children, one male and the other female, carried out ca. 705/1305 became problematic 20 years later, long after the children's father had died. The widowed mother used her position as legal guardian to prevent her daughter – now grown up and married – from exercising effective control over her shares of the mill; eventually, the mother sold her daughter's shares of the mill to her son, a jurist employed by the state. When her attempts to settle the dispute within the family proved unsuccessful, the daughter took her case to a sharī a court judge; the latter solicited the legal advice of a muftī, who called for nullification of the sale. The case sheds light on the operation of the Islamic legal system, points to the willingness of legal actors to uphold the rights of a female against a powerful male relative, and suggests that Muslim judges enjoyed a relatively large measure of judicial autonomy.

Historians of Muslim societies have observed that, in principle, the strict application of the Islamic rules of inheritance would result in the progressive fragmentation of capital. Although technically correct, the observation fails to take into account the fact that the Islamic inheritance rules are but part of a larger and flexible Islamic inheritance system that also includes bequests, gifts inter vivos, family endowments, dowries, fictitious sales, and other modes for the devolution of property. This larger system has served Muslims, rich and poor, for over 1,400 years, although it operates differently in different places. The most important component of the Islamic inheritance system arguably has been the family endowment, known among the Malikis as ḥabs (popularly, habous) and elsewhere as waqf ahlī. This institution came into existence in the first Islamic century, in part because the Islamic inheritance rules proved too constraining, and soon became an integral component of the Islamic legal system. It allows a proprietor to transform immovable property such as a house or field into a perpetual endowment for one or more beneficiaries and subsequent generations of descendants; the property thereafter may not be bought, sold, or inherited. The founder designates the initial beneficiaries and defines the strategy according to which usufructory rights pass from one generation to the next. Thus, the founder may control the devolution ofendowment revenues for many generations after his or her death.

One of the earliest and most highly developed areas of orientalist scholarly production was the study of Islamic law. Modern western investigation of Islamic law emerged during the era of European colonial expansion, and the first studies of the subject were written by citizens of the colonial powers, many of whom had lived in the colonies for extended periods. These men produced the first translations of legal texts, the first studies of individual legal institutions, and the first comprehensive studies of Islamic law, thereby laying the foundations for the modern discipline of Islamic legal history. Surprisingly, students of orientalism have devoted little attention to the colonials'viewsof Islamic law—that is, to the attitudes and assumptions that underlay their writings and interpretations—or to the impact of those views on the development of Islamic legal studies as a discipline.

The essays in Islamic Ecumene address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Uzbekistan are members of a broad cultural unit. Although the Muslim inhabitants of these lands speak dozens of languages, represent numerous ethnic groups, and practice diverse forms of Islam, they are united by shared practices and worldviews shaped by religious identity. To highlight these commonalities, the co-editors invited a team of scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine Muslim societies in comparative and interconnected ways. The result is a book that showcases ethics, education, architecture, the arts, modernization, political resistance, marriage, divorce, and death rituals. Using the insights and methods of historians, anthropologists, literary critics, art historians, political scientists, and sociologists, Islamic Ecumene seeks to understand Islamic identity as a dynamic phenomenon that is reflected in the multivalent practices of the more than one billion people across the planet who identify as Muslims