In the digital age, it is crucial to use all means to facilitate the process of legal education across academic contexts. In the Arab World, understanding of contemporary legal issues suffers from a scarcity of available sources and reliance upon traditional pedagogical methods. The Islamic Court Cases project, hosted by the American University in Cairo, attempts to digitize court cases sourced mainly from the Egyptian National Archives from diverse historical periods. The primary goal of this project is to help researchers trace the evolution of legal language from the beginnings of the Islamic court system to the modern era. This presentation analyzes the initial results of this project from an analysis of 1000 previously unpublished court cases, in addition to 2000 other cases sourced from published works. Using discourse, quantitative, and qualitative analytical methods, the presentation will show how judges implemented the law in different historical contexts and developed intricate methods across several eras of the law, including the integration of forensic medicine and the analysis of physical evidence. The pilot findings demonstrate how each legal era progressed as well as the implications of these developments at the sociological and economic levels. As many of the cases are being translated to English, the presentation will also demonstrate the challenges faced by contemporary researchers in translating legal terminology used across the various eras that the project covers.

By the seventeenth century, the Hanafi legal school (madhhab), as the adopted madhhab of the Ottomans, had extended to the far reaches of the Empire. Despite this cosmopolitan reach, Hanafi jurists in localities throughout the Empire proved its malleability. To elucidate this dialectic between the global and local, this paper explores shifting notions of property in the Hanafi school in early modernity and, more broadly, highlights the contestability of madhhab boundaries, revealing the contingency of these boundaries on spatial context. Early Hanafism only considered tangible assets (‘ain) as having financial value and therefore made it difficult to justify the sale of the intangible right (?aqq) to usufruct (manfa’a) associated with another’s property. This posed a problem for the renters of endowment properties (waqf) who, because they did not own the property, were deterred from investing in infrastructure on the property if it was not to remain in their legacy. The dilemma was circumvented in the Ottoman Arab Provinces when it became customary for renters to pay an additional occupancy fee, above the rent, ensuring that the property would remain in their possession–and could even be bequeathed–as long as they paid the additional fee. The seventeenth-century Cairene Hanafi jurist Hasan al-Shurunbulali rejected this circumvention as a mere subterfuge, which he considered as transgressing the boundaries of Hanafism in its appeal to Maliki doctrines. In the nineteenth century, the Damascene Hanafi jurist Muhammad Amin Ibn Abidin, arguing against al-Shurunbulali, challenged the notion that the circumvention was exclusive to Malikism and rationalized the sale of intangible rights within Hanafism. In doing this, Ibn ??bid?n expanded and redefined the boundaries of the madhhab to embrace transactions that had hitherto been excluded. The paper therefore reveals the contentious nature of madhhab parameters in certain times and locations. Likewise, this position of Ibn Abidin is significant because it is the basis for contemporary Hanafi fatwas permitting the alienability of present-day intangible assets, such as intellectual property and franchise rights. Accordingly, Ibn Abidin’s thought is noteworthy in understanding how the Hanafi legal system transitioned to accommodate aspects of the modern economy.

This paper traces the use of a Hadith prohibiting women from learning to write. Although rejected by most Hadith scholars and jurists, it returned to prominence in the works of South Asian scholars in the second half of the 19th century and was weaponized as a response to British colonialism and the spread of English-medium education believed to contain Christian missionary influence. As debates on colonial education spread to other localities, such as Egypt, the Hadith came with it and empowered scholars who attempted to push back against modernizing national educational projects that were also seen to have an underlying Christian missionary message. As a result, the paper highlights the importance of the Hadith literature as a pragmatic – and not simply normative – source within Islamic legal discourse as it informed the debates of scholars and their responses to colonialism in different localities.