Scholarship on the Mamluk state’s mazalim and shari‘a courts have revealed a flexibility and diversity, where legal authority was exercised by numerous parties, justice privatized in the later years of the regime, and the lines between secular and religious law and authority were blurred. Recent studies of charity have further highlighted the options available to the urban poor and disenfranchised in their search for retribution and redress, ranging from the mediatory and conciliatory roles of neighborhood and Sufi institutions to more systematized methods of petition. The system described throughout is uniquely urban, relying on formal legal institutions, as revealed by legal treatises and fatwa collections, biographical entries of Cairo-based judges, and chronicles. The execution of justice in smaller cities is somewhat less familiar. The Jerusalem courts have been a focus of study, largely through the work of Little (for the fourteenth century) and Singer (for the sixteenth), who have described the kinds of cases brought to court and the formal processes there of record-keeping and resolution. Less is known about the legal systems beyond these urban centers. The region of the Transjordan (today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) is a case in point. Comprising the eastern frontier of the Mamluk state, the region passed in and out of direct Mamluk control as the state’s strategic objectives developed. The tribal structures of the region at time buttressed, at others challenged, the state, creating its own constellations of power and institutions of conflict resolution. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the mechanisms by which rural societies sought justice in late medieval Islam and the institutions – both formal (state-defined) and informal (traditional) – that supported them. The chronological focus is the Mamluk period. This paper argues for a greater informality of legal exercise in the region of the Transjordan, where tribal ties and the fluid relations among peasants and pastoralists mediated conflict and accomplished redress, than in the urban centers of Egypt and Syria. The study relies on a combination of contemporary and early Ottoman Shari‘a records from Jerusalem and Damascus, petitions from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Mt. Sinai, biographical dictionaries, and primarily Syrian-based chronicles to describe the structure of local and regional courts, trace the development of local judges’ careers, document the process of petition-making, account for the source and resolution of formal legal disputes, and illustrate the ways conflicts were resolved outside the courts through community intervention and armed revolt.

For households in the pre-modern Middle East, the prolonged absence or disappearance of spouses, especially men, was a relatively common experience. A number of factors—from trade and ‘the search for knowledge’ to marital disputes—could leave families without fathers, husbands, or any clue as to their whereabouts. This paper uses ninth-century Syriac law books and patriarchal letters, as well as Islamic legal sources, to investigate how East Syrian ecclesiastical elites in ‘Abb?sid Iraq formulated the legal problem of ‘the disappeared husband,’ and thereby sought to define the parameters of social experience of Christian households, especially their female members. First, the paper addresses the Christian theological conceptions of marriage that informed the ecclesiasts’ legislation. Averse to granting the prerogative to divorce to any community members, East Syrian churchmen argued that only with sure knowledge of a spouse’s death—not mere disappearance—could a marital bond be considered dissolved. By articulating this teaching as a communal law in response to the particular social phenomenon of the disappeared husband, these ecclesiasts sought to instantiate lay marital practices—in this case perseverance in widowhood and the denial of divorce—that accorded with their own lettered tradition. After theological teachings, a second major factor informing the ecclesiasts’ strictures was a particular understanding of world geography as fundamentally knowable and traversable. In a time of increasing missionary activity and trade by East Syrians in the caliphate and further east, ecclesiastical elites conceived of lay people as living and moving in a geographical space over which the church had observatory and regulatory power. An absent husband could thus never have truly disappeared; the catholic Church of the East would always be able to find him (or news of his death). With sure knowledge of a man’s whereabouts always close at hand, divorce need not enter into consideration. Finally, the paper considers how East Syrian women might have navigated the social difficulties of being trapped in marriages to disappeared husbands. Focusing especially on the possibilities offered by emerging Islamic legal traditions and judicial institutions, the paper examines early Muslim juridical opinions on the options available to abandoned wives to dissolve marriages; the possibility for non-Muslim women to take advantage of these positions in Muslim courts; and the strategy of conversion by non-Muslim women to enact the dissolution of unwanted marriages.

The 16th-century mystic al-Sha?rani (d. 973/1565) proposes a theory that explains Sunni legal pluralism and the richness of the Islamic textual tradition. He transcends the common wisdom that the diversity of legal opinions is a blessing from God by arguing that the contradictory statements within the different sources of the law are deliberately created by God to appeal to people’s varying levels of piety and strength. In every situation, there are two correct legal rulings: one of which is easy and the other is strict. The easier rulings are for those who are weaker in faith and the harder ones are for the select few. There is only one source for the divine law. Thus, when a person who is weak in faith and spirit draws water from that source, his/her water is as good as the water drawn by a saint. His theory was hailed by some historians as an attempt to unify the four schools, while others saw it as a continuation of the legal tradition, lacking any novelty. I argue that while his attitude shares certain characteristics with traditional approaches to legal diversity, it departs significantly from the traditional view of the oneness of truth. His continuum of legal pluralism should be situated squarely within the controversy over the prohibition of the pragmatic selection of easier rulings from the different schools, known as tatabbu? al-rukha?. He takes the side of jurists who permit the pragmatic selection of easier rulings when there is a need. Thus, such choices can only be controlled through the person herself, according to her view of her spiritual and physical strength. Since these multiple truths, which resemble Sufi stations, are ordained by God, al-Sha?rani paves the way for more acceptance of the differences among schools. His theory was designed to address some of the supporters of the pragmatic selection of easier rulings (tatabbu? al-rukha?), who did not accept rulings that contradicted the textual sources. His solution was to drive the law further towards relativism by arguing for the multiplicity of truths.

Female Intellect in 20th Century Jewish and Islamic Legal Thought: A Comparative Perspective The question of female intellectual equality in Islam and Judaism is a relatively modern one, and it is a question that was not approached in a serious, scholarly way until the second half of the 20th century. (Heschel p. xv) Both religions have a complex relationship to the problem and the question of women; in both textual traditions, there is a troubling sense of woman as “other,” as categorically different from men physically, spiritually, and intellectually. (Hadad, p. xvii) One of the most striking ways in which women are characterized as 'other' in Judaism, and to a lesser extent in Islam, is in the traditional religious understanding of female intellect as compared to male intellect. When speaking of female intellect in Islam and in Judaism, this means specifically how each faith understands the validity of female religious leadership and scholarship. For example, can women be Rabbis or Imams? Can women be witnesses in the Beis Din (Rabbinic court) or in the Shari'a courts? Can women be judges in the Shari'a courts, or Dayans (Rabbinic Judges) on the Beis Din? In both faiths, the answers to these questions stem from varying interpretations of biblical and Qur'anic statements about the nature of female intelligence when compared to male intelligence. The analysis is divided into two parts: The first part delves into the primary sources -the Qur'an, various Hadiths, the Talmud, the writings of legal scholars in both traditions, -whose injunctions about female status and authority are the foundation of the way that each legal system treats the question of female intellect. The second part of this paper examines the way that moderate Muslims and "Reform" Jews, and especially female Muslims and Jews, justify a re-reading of the Qur'an and the Torah in order to make it more inclusive and egalitarian. The attempts of both Jewish and Muslim reformist scholars to justify adding women to the judiciary, female intellectual equality, and the validity of female witness share a common argumentative framework, one that is based on a re-reading of primary textual sources and a post-modern understanding of the gender binary.

In this paper, fetvas mentioned in the court records of the Ottoman kadis will be studied. The fetvas of Ottoman seyhulislams and provincial muftis form a rich collection that can provide valuable information about the Ottoman society. In recent years, the number of studies using fetvas has dramatically increased. Yet, there is a serious shortcoming of the Ottoman fetva: it refers to the individuals with John Doe-like aliases Zeyd, Amr, Hind, etc, and does not usually give specific information as to who they are, where they are from, and when the fetva was issued. Most studies use fetvas found in the manuscript fetva collections, which form a literary genre of their own, with a layer of editorial work on top of the individually issued fetvas by the muftis or the seyhulislams. It then becomes even more problematic to ascertain the value of fetvas found in these collections as a primary source for Ottoman historiography. Luckily, these collections are not our only source for fetvas; many other Ottoman documents such as muhimme and ahkam registers and kadi court records (sicil) refer to and sometimes fully reproduce fetvas in some cases they discuss. I shall be investigating kadi sicils from such Anatolian provincial centres as Kayseri, Antep and Konya in the period 1600-1750. A quick look at these sicils reveals that they indeed contain cases in which litigants presented fetvas favorable to their argument to the court. This enables us to find out the identity of those Zeyds, Amrs and Hinds in the particular fetva in consideration. Sometimes the full fetva text is reproduced in the sicils. Furthermore, though the secondary literature mostly focuses on the fetvas of the seyhulislams, fetvas of provincial muftis are also found in these registers. What was the difference in the status of the fetvas of the seyhulislams and the provincial muftis? What is the frequency of cases in the sicils referring to a fetva? Was this frequency more or less the same, or were there any changes throughout the period? If there are two similar cases, with only one of them referring to a fetva, what could be the reason for this discrepancy? This paper will raise and try to answer these questions about the processes surrounding the fetva, starting with a request by a litigant party for a fetva to its submission to the kadi court to obtain a favorable result.