Success, Failure, and Other Historical Crafts

The author of Afghanistan Rising responds to our critical review essays by six scholars of diverse historical expertise, from the late Ottoman and Habsburg Empires to Southeast Asia, and Islamic legal history to the political economy of the British Raj and Indo-Afghan frontier. Centering administrative and constitutional developments in Afghanistan within broader regional and global currents connecting the Balkans to Indian Ocean at the turn of the twentieth century, Ahmed reflects on what it means to write “a history that most people do not think exist.”

Quantitative Approaches to Ottoman Fatwā Collections

In their joint essay, Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene make the case for “a pluralistic approach to the study of Islamic legal history,” through the lens of law and economics and other types of quantitative analysis. Regression analysis, they suggest, provides especially useful approaches suited to interdisciplinary studies of historical events. To illustrate, the authors describe the findings of their previous scholarship on Ottoman court records, for which they coded data on court petitions and were able to arrive at generalizable conclusions about access to early modern courts. Noting the uptick in digitized primary sources in the field, they predict an increase in Islamic legal scholarship that integrates quantitative analysis.

Tracing the History of Ibāḍī Law and Jurisprudence

In this essay, Ersilia Francesca reviews scholarship on Ibāḍī law, an understudied and marginalized subfield of Islamic legal history. She argues that recent scholarship in Ibāḍī law has demonstrated that Schact was mistaken to dismiss Ibāḍī jurists as outliers who adopted Sunnī legal norms with only a few tweaks. To the contrary, studying Ibāḍī law as a view of Islam “from the edge,” she contends, enables a fuller picture of the multi-faceted process of Islamic law’s emergence. She further offers a periodization for the study of Ibāḍī jurisprudence in three chronological stages: a formative stage in Basra, an intermediate stage generated by Ibāḍī travels to Oman and the Magreb, ending in “a stage of maturity.”

New Approaches to Islamic Law and the Documentary Record before 1500

Marina Rustow notes how prevalent scholarly attention is to long-form texts of Islamic law—attention that she argues, comes at the expense of studying Islamic legal documents in a sufficient manner. Study of the documents is an indispensable enterprise if we are to fully understand “how law worked in practice.” In view of what we know to have been “heaps” of documents produced by Muslim judges and notaries, Rustow underscores how particularly noticeable a disjuncture there is between those documents and the long-form texts. Moreover, scholars often skip over and thus fail to avail themselves of the utility of documents in adding texture to social and legal history. She cautions social historians against “pseudo-knowledge,” that is, the temptation to overlook complex factors, usually embedded in legal documents, that render our otherwise tame scholarly perception of the past truer but more “unruly.” In the end, her invitation to join her in the study of documents and thereby improve the state of Islamic legal history is terse and timely: “Please go find yourself some documents.”

Semantic Mapping of An Ottoman Fetva Compilation: EBUSSUUD Efendi’s Jurisprudence through a Computational Lens

Fetva collections are important sources for Islamic legal history. However, few scholars have considered a particular collection of fetvas or the fetvas of an individual jurist as specific areas of legal and historical exploration. Instead, most researchers use fetvas selectively and instrumentally, that is in (at best) small groups, and in their explorations of various other topics. This article proposes computational methodologies that could characterize the contents of a 6,000-fetva corpus by an important Ottoman jurist, Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574), to reveal its substantive composition and range. The article conceptualizes a previously uncharted textual space in a way similar to how a map depicts a geographical one. By doing so, it also provides insights into Ebussuud’s jurisprudential legacy and the major socio-legal concerns and anxieties in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century.

Origins of the Stoning Punishment

This chapter explores the deepest layer of the sunnaic paradigm, the Islamic legal history of the stoning punishment. This chapter contrasts the stoning punishment’s perceived stability and incontavertability among contemporary Northern Nigerians against early Islamic intellectual historical accounts which understand the stoning punishment as highly contested and unstable legally and epistemologically. The chapter surveys early pre-Islamic societies’ legalization of the stoning punishment, including Mesopotamia and Judaic sources, and shows how the punishment made its way into the Islamic tradition. This chapter also surveys Qur’an, hadith, linguistic, aphoristic and Islamic legal treatment of the stoning punishment, and explores the analytic tools used by Islamic jurists to make a debatable punishment legal over time.

Concubinage and Consent

In our imperfect world, rape happens frequently but nearly no one publicly defends the legitimacy of forcible or nonconsensual sex. So pervasive is deference to some notion of consent that even Daʿish supporters who uphold the permissibility of enslaving women captured in war can insist that their refusal or resistance makes sex unlawful. Apparently, one can simultaneously laud slave concubinage and anathematize rape. A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Qurʾan forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relationsmay become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master's nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime ofzinā[illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves.

Conclusion: Ottoman Cairo’s legal system and grand narratives

The conclusion reflects on the implications of the book’s findings for longer-term narratives of Islamic legal history and Ottoman history. Drawing on recent studies of the medieval period and the nineteenth century, the chapter sketches a revised grand narrative of Islamic legal history in which political and military officials play a much more prominent role, and the modernizing reforms of the nineteenth century build on indigenous precedents as well as western influences. The conclusion also refines the prevailing model of decentralization in the historiography of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Although the imperial government often found itself unable to impose its will on powerful provincial elites, provincial subjects continued to demand the intervention of imperial institutions, in particular legal institutions, into their affairs. In many ways, Istanbul’s authority in Egypt was invited, rather than imposed.

An Epistemic Shift in Islamic Law

In this article, I combine textual research with ethnographic data collected at al-Azhar and Dār al-ʿUlūm to investigate how the modernization of traditional religious learning has transformed the character of Islamic legal doctrine. I argue that changes in educational techniques have produced a shift in “episteme”. Whereas traditional religious learning was dominated by language-based conceptions of knowledge, modern reforms have reoriented education towards new conceptions modeled on the natural sciences. This transformation has fundamentally altered patterns of legal reasoning, particularly with respect to ijtihād and taqlīd. I use these observations to urge a rethinking of the perspectives on ijtihād and taqlīd that currently structure Western research on Islamic legal history.