There are today quite a few series of “Handbooks” produced by different publishers. The book under review is one such, focused on the study of the Sharīʿa. A hefty tome of almost 1,000 pages, it is divided into 35 substantial chapters written by some of the most prominent, often younger, scholars in the field.
While the Sharīʿa has always been a central topic in Islamic studies, it is fair to say that the field was given new impetus in the mid-1990s when scholars approaching it from many different methodological backgrounds, from philosophy and religion, through law, to anthropology and sociology, came together and began talking to each other in a systematic way. This approach of seeing Islamic law both as a discursive or textual tradition, and as social reality formed by actors in contexts, has become known as the “Islamic law and society” approach, so named after the journal and monograph series that started up around that time. After some 25 years, it may be the right time to sum up the findings of this generation of research, and this is what the present handbook sets out to do.
In line with “text and practice” duality, the book is divided into five main sections. The first two deal with theoretical discussions of locating “Islamic law” in disciplinary contexts and the legal theory of the Sharīʿa. The second main part, divided into chronological and regional studies, focuses on Islamic law in practice, from its formation until the present, while a last section delineates some areas where the Sharīʿa is relevant today, including constitutional law, finance, and animal rights, in addition to the more commonly discussed family law and human rights.
The volume's approach is historiographical: each article discusses either recent or classical works on the topic at hand. Thus, the well-known criticisms of Orientalists and what the term means is discussed in many articles, but many focus on the attempts by “pragmatists” to go beyond this dichotomy. Rumee Ahmed, in his contribution on law and theology, thus stresses that the study of theology cannot be divorced from its political implications and must address historical and social concerns. Conversely, John Bowen on anthropology notes that much recent social science research reaches out and includes the study of texts and how they are used and interpreted in the social reality of judges and other actors. Contextualizing the usage of texts does not, he argues, threaten the textual tradition, but rather displays its versatility.
The section on practices of law includes much-needed and very useful overviews of some of the less-studied institutions of law, such as the muḥtasib and the maẓālim. The former, often translated as “market inspector”, but also as “defender of the social mores”, is discussed by Kristen Stilt – based in part on her research on the muḥtasib in Mamluk Cairo – and M. Safa Saraçoğlu. They emphasize that the muḥtasib often appears as a clearly subordinate official, under the supervision of the qāḍī judge, but could on different occasions have wide powers to judge both ḥadd and taʿzīr cases.
Mathieu Tillier has written a number of articles on the maẓālim (“sultan's courts”), and summarizes them in a criticism of the established views inspired by Tyan. Tyan wrote on the basis of normative texts, which led him to present the maẓālim as a far more uniform and established system than it was. More often than not, it merged into the general concept of a sultan's duty to promote equity (siyāsa), and should be seen rather as an occasional supplementary forum to the qāḍī's court than as a superior alternative.
The historical section, after chapters on the formative and classical periods, includes chapters on both periods that have been widely studied, such as Ottoman law, and those which have not, such as the Mughal empire. As we know, the Ottoman period is open for studies of law in practice, as court records were widely retained from that time onwards. For example, Haim Gerber, in his article on the period, discusses recent works on the legal response to prostitution. These show, in some contrast to the letter of the law, that prostitution was seldom treated as zinā, fornication leading to the death penalty. Instead, the courts appear to have accepted the practice as an inevitable, though reprehensible, fact of life, and focused on keeping it out of the more genteel districts, or expelling prostitutes from the town altogether. In general, forced labour (short-term galley slavery) was a more common substitution for ḥudūd penalties. Surprisingly, in Gerber's article, there is little mention of kanun, normally seen as one of the most significant aspects of Ottoman law.
There is unfortunately far less source material on Mughal Islamic law, the topic that M. Reza Pirbhai examines. Indeed, many historians have effectively ignored the fact that the Mughals practised a specific Islamic law, with the exception of the “rigorist” sultan Aurangzeb. Thus, more attention has been paid to the manuals of law, such as the Hidāya (actually from Central Asia), and the later establishment of Anglo-Muhammadan law. From the 1980s onwards, however, some works have appeared that dispense with the classical dichotomy of Muslim vs. Indic law, showing how the Mughals assimilated Indic, Persian, and Turko-Mongol norms to Islamic thought and institutions.
This volume gives a comprehensive survey of the state of knowledge today. The provocative introductory essay by Ayesha Chaudhry denounces the traditions of “White supremacist Islamic studies” and “Patriarchal Islamic legal studies” that unite in a search for a “true Islam” to be found in the classical texts. The volume demonstrates how far we have now moved away from such essentialism, towards a study of Islamic law as a phenomenon that varies dramatically with historical and social contexts, and how the “texts” interact with these realities in myriad different ways. It is highly recommended for those who wish to be informed about the state of knowledge in the field today.
