Islamic law clearly plays a central role in the formation of distinctively Islamic societies and cultures. Yet the specific dynamics of this relationship between Islamic law and wider Islamic culture is not well understood. Recent scholarship has shown that Islamic law was followed qua law more than had previously been recognized, but how this fact shaped daily life and cultural activity remains unclear. Moreover, certain elements of Islamic law have at times been resisted by portions of Muslim societies--the ban on alcohol, for example, has been unevenly embraced in Islamic history. Yet even where not strictly observed, Islamic law has undoubtedly deeply influenced Muslim life. This paper strives to enhance our understanding of the specific ways Islamic law and Islamic cultures have interacted. Building on a strong foundation in the history and technical details of fiqh discourses, I explore representations of Islamic law (jurists, courts, legal terms, etc.) in a range of early, non-legal literary works. I begin with the towering figure of al-Jahiz (d. 255/868), whose eclectic work contains numerous references to laws, jurists, and judges (e.g., "The Qadi and the Fly" from Kitab al-Hayawan). I argue that the overall impression here is of ambivalence; this author, whose career spans the "formative" period of Islamic law, presents the law as a force of order aligned against social and even natural chaos, yet consistently implies that Muslims do well to avoid the law at nearly any cost: being miserly may be bad, but getting involved with the law is worse. Thus al-Jahiz promotes a more informal, even private moral order hedged in by law but at its best when operating more organically. The paper then turns to the maqamat works of al-Hamadhani (d. 398/1008) and al-Hariri (d. 516/1122), and again finds a marked ambivalence toward Islamic law. Like al-Jahiz, these two authors delight in deflating the pretentious and hypocritical, and more often than not law seems to be seen as an obstacle rather than an ally in this battle. Taken together, these early litterateurs suggest that their own biting prose and satirical saj` can not only counter the potentially corrosive and disingenuous influence of the law but even promote a rich and positive moral order of their own. The law appears as a blunt instrument of dubious moral value; a keen eye and rapier pen can best the law at its own game.

In this paper, I consider the many popular representations of jurists and the workings of justice in the Arabian Nights. By investigating tales in the Arabian Nights and other related story collections and folktales, I examine the various ways in which such narrative portrayals reveal and reflect societal anxieties, fears, and prejudices about the jurists, the legal process, the law, and justice. In focusing upon the Arabian Nights and folkloric materials, I contrast elite and popular attitudes toward legal authorities and the law more generally. In the first section of the paper, I examine descriptions of judges' behavior in the Arabian Nights and compare the relatively large number of stories relating to the judicial misconduct such as the receipt of bribes, amorous involvement with the litigants, and other inappropriate behaviors that call into question the validity of judges' rulings. I argue that judges in the Arabian Nights are often portrayed as sacrificing and succumbing to baser desires. While doubtless such tales were entertaining, I argue that such descriptions reflect the doubts and apprehensions that many had about the validity of legal scholars' claims to autonomous legal authority. In contrast to these stories, I also discuss several motifs that display cleverness and wisdom of judges in the face of difficult decisions. In the second section of the paper, I consider how various stories describe the interactions of common people with the legal process. In particular, I am interested in exploring how popular notions of justice and fairness were explicitly framed in contrast to the workings of Islamic law and how the narratives of legal justice related to the larger narrative structures in the stories found in the Arabian Nights. Throughout this paper, I compare similar motifs in other literary collections (adab) and also their continued presence in popular oral folklore. In the conclusion to this paper, I examine some of the similarities and differences of popular portrayals of figures of literate authority to those texts written for literate and cultural elites. I also consider parallels to popular representations of figures of religious authority in other religious and cultural milieux.

Islamic legal studies focused on fatwas, jurists' responses to legal questions, have proliferated in the past few decades. Scholars have praised this legal genre as offering a unique window onto the intersections of law and society. As David Powers has argued, the questions reveal the types of concerns raised by individuals in specific socio-historical contexts, while the answers show us how jurists adapted the law to particular cases. Fatwas are most often contrasted with substantive legal manuals (mutun), which set forth a legal school's basic, agreed-upon laws which are good for all times and places. Yet there is a rich array of Islamic legal genres left unaddressed by this strict dichotomy between fatwas and mutun. This paper argues that fatwas lie at the far end of a spectrum, rather than being completely unique, with regard to their degree of context-specificity. In order to demonstrate this point, this study examines the treatment of one legal issue in the MtlikM school of law, the ability to undertake the pilgrimage, across five distinct legal genres: 1) mutun, 2) commentaries on mutun (shurnh), 3) supra-commentaries (hawish ), 4) works of al-haw dith wa'l-bida', devoted to denouncing illegitimate practices, and 5) fatwas. In the two prominent Moliko mutun, the Ris la of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayraw?n (d. 386/996) and the Mukhtasar of Khalel b. Ishaq (d. 776/1374), the authors duly note that Muslims' obligation to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca is conditional upon their ability to do so, but this qualification receives no special attention. On the other hand, several prominent jurists, including Tunisians al-Lakhmd (d. 478/1085), al-Mhzar (d. 536/1141) and al-Burzuld (d. 841/1438), and the Andalus Ibn Rushd the Grandfather (d. 520/1126), declared all Muslims in the Islamic West in their eras to be incapable of performing the pilgrimage (for various reasons), and thus prohibited from attempting the journey. By examining this condition of ability in Miliko shuroh, hawbshi, and works of al-hawhdith wa'l-bida', I demonstrate that the leap from an obligatory pillar of the religion to a prohibited act is not accomplished in a single bound. Rather, numerous qualifications and contextual considerations are presented in these intermediate genres. My analysis highlights al-Hattrb's (d. 954/1547) Mawlhib al-Jalal, a commentary on the Mukhtasar, and on Ibn al-Hmjj's (d. 737/1336) al-Madkhal, on reprehensible innovations; both authors prohibit the pilgrimage under certain circumstances. This study concludes that legal genres other than fatwas deserve greater attention as potential historical sources.

Discussions of legal change in the shar'i system often focus on the role of legal opinions (fatwas) in addressing concrete legal problems that may reflect emerging social needs. Wael Hallaq has argued that fatwas are the conduit through which new questions and approaches can be introduced into legal discourse, ultimately becoming incorporated into the standard manuals of the schools of law and renewing their relevance. Hallaq has presented substantial evidence that, to a large degree, the body of fatwas available to us represents responses to actual questions raised by historical persons, rather than to abstract or hypothetical scenarios. The generic form of the legal enquiry (istifta') in many cases results from a process of abstraction that strips an originally concrete and circumstantial enquiry of its extraneous detail, yielding a neutral legal fact pattern that can be answered in abstract terms. Indeed, Islamic legal theorists distinguished between judges' verdicts and muftis' opinions in part by observing that judicial verdicts apply to concrete individuals, while legal opinions (fatwas) apply to generic classes. In recent years, scholars such as David Powers have taken advantage of fatwas responding to queries that are reported in the sources with their original degree of specificity intact. Despite the great progress that has occurred in recognizing and exploiting legal inquiries and opinions as historical sources, there has been a tendency to regard the legal process as occurring between the questioner (and sometimes his or her antagonists in a legal case or social conflict) and the legal scholar. Beyond this dyad has loomed the abstraction of "social change" and the resulting need for new legal solutions. This paper attempts to address the larger context of the legal process, and specifically, the process by which a given issue might be identified as a "problem" requiring legal solution. Using the example of women's access to and behavior in mosques, it uses new evidence (including new manuscript evidence) to suggest that, at least in some cases, a number of different actors could be involved in raising an issue and labeling it as a problem requiring solution, with legal scholars becoming involved and issuing fatwas only at a secondary stage. Nevertheless, the legal scholars themselves tended to represent the process as having been initiated by them and driven by the issuing of fatwas and the construction of legal rationales, eliding the role of non-scholarly actors.

Abu Bakr Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 543/1148) was one of the most important Andalusi religious scholars of the Almoravid period and served for many years as Qadi al-Qudat of Seville. His autobiographical account of his studies in the Middle East allow us to reconstruct the route by which Abu Bakr became a jurist--and the way he depicted that process in later years to bolster his prestige and authority. Though he seems to have trained in his youth to become a courtier in ta'ifa era Seville as his father had been, the absorption of Seville into the Almoravid Empire and the confiscation of his family's fortune meant he had to re-invent himself at the age of 17. The most prestigious path open to him under the Almoravids was to become a jurist. He undertook a perilous journey to the east with his father, who used his diplomatic skills to secure a coveted investiture from the Abbasid Caliph for the Almoravid sultan Yusuf Ibn Tashfin in this hopes that the sultan would rehabilitate him out of gratitude. Abu Bakr pursued a parallel effort to restore the status of the family, studying religious sciences with some of the great religious scholars of the age, including al-Ghazali. When Abu Bakr returned, he was able to claim elite status on the basis of his legal knowledge and scholarly pedigree; he eventually got his family's property restored. Unlike many other Andalusi jurists who undertook a similar journey, Abu Bakr never ceased referring to it in his writings. He remained anxious about his status and authority and had to keep reiterating his right to it on the basis of his studies in the Middle Eastern centers of Islamic learning. This paper will examine Abu Bakr's depiction of his journey to the East, especially in his Qanun al-ta'wil, seeing both his voyage and his later literary depiction of that voyage as strategies at different points in Abu Bakr's career to claim authority as a jurist. This will shed light on diffusion of religious knowledge from the Middle East to the Islamic West (clearly a center-periphery relationship), the unique role of the qadi in the Almoravid state and society, and the embeddedness of legal practice in social relationships.