At present, there are approximately one million Muslim pre-nuptial agreements in circulation in the United States. A uniform system has not emerged, however, for interpreting these contracts in American courts, due to the lack of uniformity that exists among “experts” in Islamic law. As Islam makes no formal distinction between the clergy and the laity, Imams with no formal training in Islamic jurisprudence and a poor understanding of Islamic law are often presented to American judges as experts in the Shar’ia; the results are unpredictable and inconsistent. For example, one expert might testify that the sadaq is a “bride price,” rendering the terms of the marriage contract illegal and thus unenforceable; another expert might claim that the sadaq is a “gift” from the husband to the wife, enabling the judge to uphold the contract as it was written. As expert testimony is a key factor in a judge’s decision to uphold or discard a given Muslim marriage contract, his or her testimony has ramifications for Muslim women in particular, who often rely on their marriage contracts to preserve their property and autonomy. While judges face a significant challenge in interpreting the terms and conditions of Muslim marriage contracts with any degree of certainty, Muslim couples face difficulty in drawing up legally valid contracts, given that no clear guidelines exist as to how the contract will be interpreted, nor which expert’s testimony will be regarded as dispositive. This paper focuses on the problems posed by religio-cultural pluralism in American courts and discusses the issues that arise in the adjudication of Muslim family issues. After giving an overview of American family law and how it articulates with relevant aspects of the Shar’ia, I will argue that developing clear guidelines for writing Muslim marriage contracts will have widespread positive consequences for Muslim couples in general, and for Muslim women in particular.

Attendance registers (tibaq or sama‘at) are ubiquitous in medieval hadith manuscripts; their functions have, however, received little attention and have often been misunderstood in the secondary literature. The audition register was originally developed to record the attendance of adults who had heard an unvocalized text read aloud by a master and could therefore, theoretically, transmit the text accurately to the following generation. By the close of the fourth/tenth century the hadith corpus had been canonized and was no longer thought to require the careful preservation it once had. Although no longer needed for the preservation of hadith, the paradigm of oral hadith transmission was maintained as a means of transmitting religious capital and scholarly authority. The cultivation of short chains of transmission (isnads), which was originally prized as a means of avoiding mistakes in transmission, increasingly became an end in itself and replaced preservation as the primary mark of quality in hadith transmission. The attendance register was adapted to serve this aim. By having infants and young children hear a hadith text read aloud in the presence of an elderly authority, several links could be eliminated from the isnad. Infants and young children who attended a hadith reading were, of course, unlikely to remember much, if anything, about the reading fifty or more years later when the time came for them to transmit what they had ‘heard.’ The attendance register offered a solution to this problem and the attendance of children and infants began to be recorded in attendance registers. A child who was recorded in a register for a reading of al-Bukhari’s Sahih at four years old and lived to old age would possess a short isnad and would be highly sought after as a result. Drawing on a variety of both published and manuscript sources, this paper explores this function of the attendance register through the case of an obscure elderly illiterate stone mason, Abu ‘Abbas al-Hajjar, who upon having his name discovered in an attendance register for a reading of al-Bukhari, which took place close to a century earlier, rose to fame and fortune, receiving large sums to go on tour throughout the Mamluk realm and transmitting to the foremost hadith authorities of his time. As a result of his discovery in this attendance register al-Hajjar became a central link in almost all latter chains of transmission from Fez to Istanbul, to Delhi.

In 1851, the Parsi (Zoroastrian) community of Mumbai published an ahd nameh, or charter, that was supposedly issued by the Prophet Muhammad to the family of Salman al-Farisi in the seventh century C.E. Salman had been an early, prominent convert to Islam from Zoroastrianism. The ahd nameh, written in Arabic, granted Salman’s Zoroastrian descendants autonomy in their religious affairs. It also freed them from certain disabilities imposed on dhimmis under Islamic law. Although the Parsis insist on the ahd nameh’s authenticity, Western scholars have dismissed it as a later Indian forgery. Yet I have discovered copies of the ahd nameh in Persian histories from Iran as early as the twelfth century. My research indicates that the Indian ahd nameh is in fact an earlier Iranian document taken out of context. There are at least four extant versions of the ahd nameh, two from Iran and India, respectively. However, there are substantial differences between the Iranian versions of the text found in Mujmal al-Tawarikh (520 A.H./1128 C.E.) and Tarikh-i Guzideh (730/1330), and the Indian versions found in Persian MS #2556 (1064/1654) of the British Library and Tuqviuti-Din-i-Mazdiasna (1851). It is primarily a lack of context that distinguishes the Indian versions of the ahd nameh from the Iranian ones. The Iranian versions begin with Salman asking Muhammad for advice about how to treat Zoroastrians. It seems, therefore, that the Iranian versions of the ahd nameh belong to a genre of early Muslim literature that sought to clarify the Zoroastrians’ ambiguous legal status by dictating their proper treatment under Muslim rule. These dictates were often attributed to either Muhammad or Salman (or, in this case, both) to make them authoritative. The Indian versions of the ahd nameh offer no such context, meaning that somewhere between Iran and India this document lost its preface; that is, the ahd nameh was literally and figuratively taken out of context. The text also underwent other changes. The Indian versions dropped phrases that offered economic privileges to the Zoroastrians and added phrases that emancipated the Zoroastrians from later legal restrictions placed on dhimmis. The latter led scholars to assume that the Indian ahd nameh was a forgery. However, these studies did not take into account the Iranian versions of the text. Thus, scholars prematurely dismissed the content of the Indian ahd nameh without appreciating its original, Iranian context.

Waqf endowment played a crucial role in the development of Damascus from medieval to the Ottoman period, as 31 jami’s , 152 madrasas and 76 Sufi convents were founded by the end of the Mamluk period and financially supported by waqf properties. However former studies have focused on larger endowment for major religious institutes by the ruling persons, because of scarce documentary sources before the Ottoman period. This paper studies waqf activity in Damascus Province in the 16th century., using three waqf survey registers preserved at the Archive of the Prime Minster’s Office in Istanbul They recorded the waqf endowment deeds from the 12th to the 16th century and the donated properties with its location and income. I have already published an article focusing on waqf endowment related to the Salihiyya Quarter in the northern suburbs of Damascus, which makes clear the following points; First most of endowed properties are agricultural ones which supported urban development. Second, the preponderance of family waqf of ordinary people who donated one or two of their private properties. Third there were a small number of waqf deeds the date of which was before the 14th century though it came to a boom of waqf endowment at that time. The disappearance of earlier waqf properties suggests they were embezzled and transformed to private properties. Here examining all the waqf deeds recorded in the three registers (about 3000 waqf deeds recording 15,000 properties), I will elucidate socio-economic relation between the city and surrounding rural regions by means of waqf endowment at the grass-roots level, showing statistical data and concrete examples.It reveals that the city dominated the rural regions not only by political power of the military but also by religious institution managed by the ulama.