Could Women Own Agricultural Land? Rethinking the Relationship of Islamic Law and Contextual Reality (Wāqiʿ)

Various studies have discussed the Ḥanafī opinion about the ownership of agricultural land. In this study, instead, I analyze the Mālikīs’ and Shāfiʿīs’ views. Their madhāhib suggested that arable land was in the public ownership of the state. However, I show how the systemized deprivation of women from inheriting agricultural land in the Ottoman period motivated late Mālikīs and Shāfiʿīs to divert from the standard doctrine of their madhāhib. Late scholars suggested that Egyptian land should be owned by the cultivators, and, therefore, be inheritable by both men and women. This turn of late Mālikīs and Shāfiʿīs, which stands as an antithesis to the Ḥanafīs’ development, stimulates us to think of a different mechanism of ijtihād. In this mechanism, Islamic law reform is defined by questioning and challenging the contextual reality (wāqiʿ) instead of being adjusted to it, even if this reality is not prohibited.

Companions of the Prophet as Anti-Colonial Fighters: The Political Evolution of ʿAlī Tales in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe

Tales about the caliph ʿAlī have circulated as popular entertainment throughout the Islamic world since the medieval era. While their meaning to their audiences has varied, on the frontiers of Islam, including in Siberia and the Kazakh steppe, the battles of ʿAlī and other companions of the Prophet against infidels took on special meaning. Among Kazakh nomads under Russian rule, these tales gained broad popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century as the status of Kazakhs as a Muslim community came under threat from changing Russian policies. It was at this time that Kazakh-language ʿAlī tales were composed and published by Muslim publishers in Russia. One of these was the Qiṣṣa-yi Ṣalṣāl, by the Siberian poet Mäulekey Yumachikov, in which the infidels whom ʿAlī and the other companions battle are clearly identified as being Russians, although placed in the earliest period of Islam. This tale enables us to see the political evolution of such tales, which constitute a response to the cultural and political pressures of Russian colonialism.