In Damascus in 754/1353, the Muslim Mamluk scholar Taqi al-Din al-Subki (d.756/1355) wrote his epistle 'Sabab al-inkifaf ‘an iqra’ al-Kashshaf (Reasons for Cessation from the Teaching of al-Kashshaf)'. In it, he declares that he stopped reading and teaching al-Zamakhshari’s (d. 538/1144) Qur’an commentary, Kashshaf, which he had loved during his youth in Cairo. After moving to Damascus, he became uneasy about Kashshaf’s Mu‘tazili views that denigrate the Prophet Muhammad. Walid Saleh argues that this shift may reflect the intellectual struggle between different spectra of Islam such as Sunni and Mu‘tazili. I will assess al-Subki’s shift by examining the socio-political conditions of the Mamluk fourteenth century. Political, geographic, and social differences between Cairo and Damascus helped shape the Mamluks’ policies and the religious elite’s attitudes towards Kashshaf, which was popular in ?ufi and Shi‘i circles. Cairo was politically stable and socially tolerant, due to its geographical location far from the areas of political tension. ?ufis and Shi‘is had no clear political affiliations and were able to work in the Mamluk bureaucracy. Furthermore, despite some harassment, Cairo did not record any executions of ?ufis or Shi‘is. In this environment, Kashshaf did not represent a political threat, despite its incompatibilities with Sunni ideology. In Damascus, the situation was different; the region was politically inflamed and socially turbulent. Geographically, it bordered the Mongols and the crusaders, who were at war with the Mamluks. Resistance movements within Mamluk lands could create alliances within bordering states, including the newly emerged Sarbadar, which sponsored a doctrine that combined ?ufi and Shi‘i ideas. To strengthen security, the Mamluks took strict measures here against ?ufis and Shi‘is. As a judge in the Mamluk court in Damascus, therefore, al-Subki took a firm stance against Kashshaf.

The paper attempts to show how some early works of Islamic law gendered public space and constructed an ideal virtuous Muslim woman who was largely invisible. By “gendering the space” I mean two things: first, the process of supporting the seclusion of women in the domestic sphere through a pietistic legal discourse created by some male legists; and second, the imposition of certain restrictions on women when they are present in the public domain. These restrictions reflect an assumption that such space is primarily a male domain, and as a result, women are responsible for accommodating the male norms of that domain and not vice versa. In order to do that, the paper examines how the process unfolded in three different cultural milieus: Mesopotamia, Medina and Mecca. This comparative approach aims to highlight the differences among these regions when it came to addressing the question of women’s visibility in public space. Far from settling the “women’s question,” the paper’s main goal is to identify some areas in Islamic law that played a role, however minor or indirect, in prescribing the seclusion of women in the domestic domain. Recognizing the partially prescriptive nature of Islamic law, the focus here is on presenting the way in which some Islamic legal discourses made undesirable the presence of women in the public space and their participation in public community affairs. The second contribution of the paper is highlighting the possibilities that these early legal discourses created for women, and hence identifying the paths that were not taken. These two contributions could help illuminate the relationship between Islamic law and society as far as the question of gender is concerned. The paper concludes that the eighth and early ninth centuries, the period when legal schools were starting to form, was a time of flux in opinions. The three regional schools markedly diverged when it came to the question of women’s visibility in public space. Some of these early legal discourses seem to have been actively seeking to render public space a male arena by making women’s presence therein undesirable. The paper suggests that the divergence of opinion among these schools was neither due to the use of different legal theories or the acceptance of the authority of certain traditions over others, but rather a result of the influence of the jurists’ social and cultural milieus.

In this paper, I analyze classical environmental and economic thought as it is conceptualized and constructed within Islamic intellectual history, in relation to the question of moral accountability. Drawing from the classical Muslim scholarship on fiqh, kala?m, and ta?awwuf, I inquire which trends, movements, and ideas contributed toward environmental and economic thought in Islamic tradition. By bridging the gap between various classical sciences and traditions, in this research I will ask what defines environment, economy, and nature in Islamic tradition, given its polyvalent and multifaceted orientation. Looking at particular figures, such as al-Shayb?n? (d. 805), al-Mu??sib? (d. 857), al-Sulam? (d. 1021), al-Qushayr? (1074), al-Ghaz?l? (d. 1111), Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), and al-R?z? (d. 1210), among others, indicates that these scholars wrote on economic thought and preserving the natural habitat from a polyvalent and integrative perspectives, encompassing legal and theological questions from moral and cosmological standpoints. By retrieving Islamic socio-intellectual history, environmental degradation appears less a resource-problem than an attitude-problem, and pinpoints to the fact that the environmental crisis is not only an individual but also a collective issue. Hence, reading the classical Muslim legal scholars, theologians, and Sufis, presupposes that the fields of economic and environmental thought were not separated but rather amalgamated in a web of approaches, movements, and schools of thought that addressed, for instance, economic provision and conservation of nature based on the Qur’anic metaphysics. By the same token, this paper invites us to rethink Islamic tradition itself, its limitations and its potential impact in the context of current debates on environmental sustainability from a critical perspective.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the contributions of the great Maliki jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (626-84/1228-85) to Islamic legal thought. However, al-Qarafi’s compilation of legal canons and distinctions, al-Furuq, has not yet been studied, nor has the collection of his teacher, the prominent Shafi'i jurist 'Izz al-Din b. 'Abd al-Salam (577-660/1181-1262), entitled al-Qawa'id al-kubra. This paper analyzes and compares these two works to demonstrate that al-Qarafi based his collection in large part on that of his teacher and incorporated most of the material from the Qawa’id al-kubra into his Furuq. To date, this intellectual debt has remained undetected, in part because al-Qar?f? reordered, refined, and supplemented his teacher’s canons. Moreover, al-Qarafi never directly acknowledged his borrowings from his teacher’s work, and instead relied on Maliki doctrines and authorities to substantiate his canons. This ‘Malikization’ effectively obfuscated al-Qarafi’s debt to Ibn 'Abd al-Salam, while successfully indigenizing in the Maliki school a discursive analysis of the law in the language of canons. The ‘anxiety of influence’ displayed by al-Qarafi offers a unique window into the tensions surrounding cross-madhhab influence and borrowing in Mamluk Cairo, particularly among Maliki jurists vis-à-vis their more dominant Shafi'i contemporaries. It also contributes the development of a theory of borrowing and textual attribution in the early Mamluk era. Finally, this paper argues against imposing rigid genre-boundaries on legal literature in this period, and instead emphasizes that the parallel and interrelated developments in legal canons, distinctions, and purposes (maqasid) are best understood when studied synchronously.

Zakat, the annual alms required of all Muslims, is often thought to be an individual duty in which the state is only marginally involved. In Egypt during the Fatimid, Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods, however, various attempts were made to centralize the collection of zakat and place its distribution under the direct supervision of the state. Although the attempt to collect zakat from all Muslims was eventually abandoned, a special category of zakat, that owed by legal orphans (aytam), continued to be the locus of a competitive between the judiciary and the Mamluk state until the end of the Mamluk state in the early 16th century C.E. Control of the orphans’ zakat was jealously guarderded by the Shafi‘i judiciary, who dominated the Mamluk legal system. This, however, did not prevent Hanafi jurists from making several attempts in the 14th century to wrest control over supervising the wealth of orphans from the hands of the Shafi‘is. Mamluk sultans were only dissuaded from granting the Hanafis what they demanded by the collective protest of the Shafi‘is. Why did Hanafis and Shafi’is struggle to control the collection and distribution of orphans’ zakat? What kind of social or material capital did they seek, and how did this struggle over the control of the orphans’ zakat fit into a larger struggle for power over judicial positions and authority in Mamluk Egypt? The evidence from biographical dictionaries, works of legal maxims and the representation of orphans in chronicles from the period all indicate that the significance of the zakat of the orphans was not only in the access to material wealth it promised but was also due to the importance of orphans as symbols of legitimate power and legality. Moreover, fatwas written by prominent Mamluk-era jurists, including ‘Izz al-Din Ibn ‘Abd al-Salam al-Sulami (d. 1262) and Najm al-Din al-Tarasusi (d. 1357), suggest that a primary audience of this debate was the military elite, the umara’, many of whom, according to contemporary chronicles, were responsible for caring for the orphaned children of their deceased comrades in arms. Hanafis like al-Tarasusi argued that their madhhab was preferable for the umara’ because it did not require zakat to be payed at all. By not listening to the Hanafis, the Mamluk sultans made a decision to neglect the interests of their military in order to gain the support of the Shafi‘i legal scholars.