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Islamic Law: Its Sources, Interpretation and the Translation of It into Laws Written in English

• Published: 21 March 2016
• Volume 29 , pages 251–260, ( 2016 )

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• Rafat Y. Alwazna 1  

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1 The Qurʾān and the Sunna

The two primary and transmitted sources of Islamic Law are the Qurʾān and the Sunna (Prophetic traditions and practices). This combination of the two crucial sources of Islamic Law is seen as a link between reason and revelation. Indeed, the marriage between these two sources has resulted in the emergence of Islamic Law [ 8 : p. 15]. The Qurʾān is considered the most sacred and important source of Islamic Law, which contains verses related to god, human beliefs and how a particular believer should live in this worldly life. The human conduct that should govern the believers’ life, which is clearly stated in the Qurʾān, is indeed the domain of Islamic Law. The Qurʾān comprises about five hundred legal verses that explicitly set out legal rulings that need to be applied by all believers [ 8 : p. 16]. Even non-legal verses in the Qurʾān do support the establishment of the legal system of Islam, as will be expounded by Professor Almatroudi. The second primary and transmitted source of Islamic Law is the Sunna, which represents the Prophet Mohammad’s (peace be upon him) deeds and sayings, which were formulated in the form of narratives and became known as Prophetic Ḥadīth [ 8 : p. 16]. The Sunna also comprises a number of legal provisions that must be applied by all believers of Islam. Certain legal rulings in these transmitted Islamic sources are definitive. In other words, the law-giver (God) has formulated them in such a way which does not need personal legal reasoning and is not open to different interpretations as they are clear and definitive. Conversely, there exists a corpus of legal contents stated in both the Qurʾān and the Sunna, the application of which requires reasoning. The law-giver who has formulated certain legal rulings stated in the Qurʾān and the Sunna in such a way that never accepts two different interpretations, could have also done the same with regard to the rest of legal contents laid down in the aforementioned Islamic sources. However, there has been a pivotal reason behind making a huge bulk of legal contents mentioned in the Qurʾān and the Sunna open to legal reasoning. This flexibility in the law qualifies it to be legally valid for all legal cases regardless of time and place as it is amenable to development and change, a matter which will be further discussed in Sect.  3 . Furthermore, the difference in the interpretation of a particular legal issue is deemed amongst jurists a kind of mercy. The de facto corpus of legal contents stated in the Qurʾān and the Sunna, the application of which demands independent legal reasoning leads us to another source of Islamic Law known as legal reasoning.

2 Legal Reasoning

Legal reasoning (ijtihād) is an untransmitted source of Islamic Law, whose emergence is due to the fact that Islamic jurists could not always interpret the language of the Qurʾān and that of the Sunna in the same way arriving at the same legal result, rather they frequently differ in their interpretations of certain Qurʾānic verses and particular Prophetic traditions, reaching different legal rulings. This is owing to the fact that the law-giver has deliberately set out a number of legal rulings in these two revealed legal sources, and formulated them in such a way that makes them open to reasoning and juristic interpretation so that the law becomes legally valid on a permanent basis and is susceptible to development as new legal issues emerge. Hallaq [ 8 : p. 19] points out that certain terms in the Qurʾān and the Sunna can have more than a single legal interpretation. Metaphorical lexical items, for instance, need to be interpreted to convey specific legal meanings. Hence, Muslim jurists develop a corpus of certain linguistic rules in an attempt to surmount such problems. One crucial aim of exercising his personal reasoning is that the jurist would establish a particular legal norm for each legal case he confronts [ 8 : p. 19].

Acts according to the Sharīʿa fall within five different legal norms. The first is represented by the prohibited category, which demands punishing the doer after committing a prohibited act. The second is the obligatory category, which entails punishment on account of failure to perform an act whose performance is deemed obligatory in the eyes of Islamic Law. Other categories are the recommended, permissible and abominable. If the person performs the abominable and not the recommended category, he/she shall not be punished. However, the person, by performing the recommended and leaving the abominable, shall be rewarded in the hereafter. The permissible category involves neither permission, nor prohibition, a matter which entails neither reward, nor punishment. Hence, when the jurist confronts a Qurʾānic verse and/or a Prophetic tradition which may include an imperative or prohibitive form, he is required to specify within which of the five legal norms/categories the legal ruling of the verse and/or the tradition falls [ 8 : p. 20].

2.1 Consensus

Related to legal reasoning is another source of Islamic Law known as consensus (ijmāʿ), which refers to the agreement of jurists, living in a particular age, on a specific legal ruling of a particular act, after being subject to different legal views and opinions. Consensus has to be founded on the Qurʾān and/or the Sunna. Consensus plays a crucial role in ratifying and ascertaining legal rules which may have been grounded in probable evidence. If there exists a particular consensus on a specific probable evidence, such evidence can never be subject to error. Consequently, it can safely be argued that consensus is chiefly based on rules which are grounded in particular methods of reasoning. However, it is worth noting that the legal cases upon which there has been consensus are indeed limited within Islamic Law, though such legal cases have acquired special importance on account of being subject to this extraordinary source of law [ 8 : p. 22]. Such legal cases cannot be stated here due to space restrictions.

2.2 Analogy

Also, categorized within the realm of legal reasoning is another legal source of Islam referred to as analogy (qiyās). This source of law is not deemed a material legal source, the legal content of which can be depended upon by the jurists. However, it is a legal source that can offer ways which can be utilised by the jurist to reach legal norms. Analogy is composed of four crucial components. The first is represented by the new case which demands a legal ruling; the implementation of one of the five legal norms stated above. The second is the original case which may be mentioned in the Qurʾān or the Sunna, or accepted by consensus. The third deals with the attribute to the new case as well as the original one. The last component resides in the legal norm that serves as a legal ruling in the original case, and is applied to the new case on account of the de facto similarity between the original as well as the new cases [ 8 : pp. 22–23].

2.3 Preference

Preference (istiḥsān) is a particular legal practice exercised by jurists, which falls within the sphere of legal reasoning. It is deemed an inference made on the basis of a revealed text, though gives rise to a different legal result from that arrived at by analogy. The main difference between analogy and preference may lie in the fact that while the reasoning behind analogy falls chiefly within the large body of the law with no exception allowed, the reasoning underpinning preference, on the other hand, is to find a particular exception through the jurist’s selection of a revealed text that allows this very exception [ 8 : pp. 25–26]. A clear example for this is a person who has eaten in the day of Ramadan mistakenly. The reasoning behind analogy dictates that the person has to compensate for that day as there is no exception as to whether the person has eaten in the day of Ramadan intentionally or otherwise. Conversely, reasoning via preference does not demand compensation since the person has not eaten intentionally, rather he has done so mistakenly. It is worth pointing out that the reasoning underpinning preference is based on a valid Prophetic tradition and does therefore supersede the reasoning behind the drawn analogy. Not all preference exceptions are founded on revealed texts, some of which are based on consensus, while others are grounded in the principle of necessity.

2.4 Public Interest

Public interest (istiṣlāḥ) is another legal practice which is contained within legal reasoning. The reasoning of public interest does not seem to be founded on the Qurʾān. Public interest, however, plays an undeniably crucial role in the determination of the ratio’s suitability peculiar to analogy. This strong connection between the ratio and suitability has resulted in considering public interest by some jurists an extension to analogy. There are, indeed, certain universal principles on which the Sharīʿa is generally based. These reside in the protection of one’s life, his/her mind, offspring, religion as well as property [ 8 : p. 26]. If the feature of public interest in a particular case is in line with these universal principles, the reasoning in accordance with publish interest must be exercised. It is worth stating that the element of universality is of paramount importance as the law intends to serve interests of Muslims at large [ 8 : p. 27].

3 Interpretation of Islamic Law

As stated above, the two primary sources of Islamic Law are the Qurʾān and the Sunna. These two revealed legal sources have contained certain definitive legal rulings, which require no legal reasoning from the part of the jurist, rather need to be applied as they are. The Qurʾān and the Sunna have also comprised legal contents, the implementation of which demands legal reasoning from the side of the jurist. This legal reasoning points to the maximum effort exerted by the jurist to interpret and apply the rules pertaining to the origins of jurisprudence (ʾuṣūl alfiqh), in quest for the appropriate legal ruling that best fits the legal case in question [ 7 : p. 3]. In deed, a huge bulk of Islamic Law is subject to legal reasoning and is dependent thereon. This is owing to the fact that only limited legal rulings stated in the Qurʾān and the Sunna have a definitive nature, and the rest of the legal body of Islamic Law is contingent upon the jurists’ legal reasoning. This is not at all a defect in the law, since the law-giver who set out definitive legal rulings, was indeed able to enforce a wholly definitive law, the application of its legal rulings is not subject to any reasoning. However, there have been important reasons behind this flexible nature of Islamic Law. This very nature of Islamic Law has made the law flexible and adaptable to all societies and regions. Moreover, the law has become susceptible to develop and change in different ways. Its development can be shown through choosing certain legal views that are more appropriate than others in addressing the legal cases concerned. The development can go even further than that by creating new legal views as new legal cases emerge [ 8 : p. 27]. This aspect does unequivocally make Islamic Law legally valid for all legal cases regardless of time and place. The importance of the interpretation of Islamic Law does not lie in the different legal views held by different jurists with regard to a particular legal case, rather it chiefly resides in the way in which the jurist interprets the law. When interpreting a particular Qurʾānic verse, for instance, the jurist cannot interpret it in isolation. He should, however, consider the verse, its legal and linguistic contexts, its occasion of revelation and all the events that surround the revelation thereof. In other words, a particular legal text never stands on its own according to Islamic legal system, but it is with no doubt influenced by a number of events that scaffold the jurist to extrapolate the most appropriate legal ruling for the legal case in question. Elements of coherence and intertextuality are of utmost significance and should always be in the jurist’s mind during the process of interpretation and extrapolation of legal provisions.

4 Translation of Islamic Law

Language is viewed as the “heart within the body of culture” [ 5 : p. 288]. Culture and language are strongly connected such that the former includes the latter [ 2 : p. 187]. When exercising interlingual translation, differences in linguistics and culture clearly emerge and challenge the translator who becomes required to bridge such gaps between the two languages in question. This is indeed the main foundation on which the majority of research projects on translating and interpreting are intrinsically based [ 9 : p. 201]. More intricacies and complications come to light when a legal text is to be translated from a single language into another, but from a specific legal system into a different legal system. Similar as well as different features between legal systems may exist, a matter which emanates from the difference in legal sources upon which each legal system is built. Engberg [ 6 : p. 11] argues that the search for possible interrelations between the source and target legal systems is considered an important requirement for rendering legal texts from one law into another. Linguistic and cultural problems in legal translation do ipso facto exist due to the difference in legal systems [ 10 : p. 247] and legal cultures.

Islamic Law, like any other law, is replete with a set of legal terms [ 1 : p. 901] with concepts which may not exist in other laws, despite the fact that such legal concepts undergo conceptual developments across different legal systems. This runs in line with Cabanellas [ 4 : p. 78], who asserts that despite the fact that concepts peculiar to legal terms go through certain processes of development across diverse sets of laws, they, however, possess different legal existence in different laws. Consequently, differences in legal systems should be put into consideration by translators in legal translation, as noted by Smith [ 11 : p. 179]. Also, the translator is required to appreciate the accuracy at both word level and sentence level in a legal discourse [ 11 : p. 180]. Based on the foregoing, it seems highly unlikely that there is one-to-one correspondence between terms specific to Islamic legal system and those particular to any legal system written in English, such as Common Law, for instance, as will be addressed by Dr El-Farahaty. However, of course, strategies to surmount such a dilemma are also in place, and legal translators often resort to them to achieve and serve the main purpose for legal translation, for further detail on this issue, please see [ 3 ].

5 Issues Discussed in the Current Issue

The present issue will deal chiefly with Islamic Law, placing special emphasis on five major issues. These lie in the sources of Islamic Law, its interpretation, economics, its finance as well as the translation between it and other laws written in English.

5.1 Issues Related to the Qurʾān and the Interpretation of Its Legal Contents

Professor Abdul-Hakim Almatroudi (University of London, United Kingdom), addresses the Qurʾān as one of the primary sources of Islamic Law, placing special emphasis on the fact that the Qurʾān is interrelated in nature such that its non-legal verses do support its legal issues. He claims that even though a large proportion of the Qurʾān lacks any explicit or implicit legal provisions, it, however, helps establish and support the system of Islamic Law. The contributor has arrived at this conclusion through carrying out profound analysis on the relationship between legal verses and those which do not comprise any legal rulings, assessing, at the same time, certain major themes, namely God, the Prophet and his message as well as the present life and the hereafter.

Dr. Mustafa Shah (University of London, United Kingdom), focuses on a study of the corpus of variae lectiones (Qurʾānic readings) and role that differences among concomitant or two-fold readings played in the interpretation of law. Reviewing the historical processes associated with the textual transmission of the Qurʾān, the contributor assesses the view that these readings were the product of attempts to circumvent legal inconsistencies in the juridical teachings of the Qurʾān. He explores, through an examination of the historical framework of the origin of variae lectiones, and by reference to early literature of grammar, the way jurists interpreted such material. The contributor also reviews different attitudes concerning types of variae lectiones which classical scholars viewed as being anomalous (shādhdha).

Dr. Ramon Harvey (Cambridge Muslim College, United Kingdom), addresses the oral transmission of the Qurʾān, which gives rise to the development of a reading tradition, which leads to diverse vocalizations made on the basis of the main Qurʾānic text of the ʿUthmānī manuscript. Ten readers were chosen by Ibn Al-Jazarī (d. 833/1429) to represent such reading tradition, while the readings of these ten readers are still considered canonical until present. Al-Kisāʾī (d. 189/805) is one of these ten readers, who has been known by his deep focus on the Qurʾānic grammar, compared to the other readers. The contributor discusses the process of selection particular to Al-Kisāʾī when having to choose a specific reading amongst numerous types of readings. He utilizes for his analysis a sample comprising fifty cases in which there are differences between Al-Kisāʾī’s reading and those of the other readers. The contributor claims that it is possible, through carrying out a comparison between Al-Kisāʾī’s reading and the notes given by classical scholars of linguistics of the Qurʾān, to suggest a typology of possible rationale behind Al-Kisāʾī’s differences in his reading from the readings of the others. Such differences in his reading from the readings of others are clearly grounded in grammatical preferences and are consistent. Analysing a range of his readings with the aim of interpreting Islamic Law would further help present the subtlety of his work.

Mr. Shafi Fazaluddin (Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales, qualified 1998, United Kingdom), tackles the concept of conciliation ethics in the Qurʾān as a crucial aspect in Islamic Law, which leads to Islamic legal rulings. It forms an important part in the legal system of Islam, settling disputes among litigant parties. The contributor points out that traditional literature specific to the concept of conciliation in the Qurʾān has often been inclined to the discussion of the process of reconciliation, though Western scholarship has little or no interest in this field. He, examining the notion of conciliation ethics in the Qurʾānic texts, questions its constituents, scope, its focus and purpose. Carrying out a survey on the whole Qurʾān, the contributor claims that the concept of conciliation is not at all restricted to Qurʾānic texts that contain the term ‘ṣulḥ’, rather it is deemed a pervasive notion that exists within social relationships. It is particularly accomplished through good behaviours, positive attitudes, dispute avoidance, etc.

5.2 Abductive Legal Reasoning and Islamic Economic Thought

Dr. Valentino Cattelan (University of Florence, Italy), pinpoints, through the use of Alice in Wonderland as a hermeneutical device in an attempt to search for the logic of Islamic jurisprudence, a crucial divergence in the implementation of abduction as a primary element of inference in Islamic Law between Western and Islamic legal thinking. Specifically, the contributor, through close examination of the relation between law and fact in symbolic terms, accentuates the fact that while Western legal thinking is characterized by having a dichotomy between fact and law, Islamic jurisprudence presents a strong connection between the ‘real’ and the ‘right’ where exercising personal reasoning ‘ijtihād’ in understanding Sharīʿa often leads to the real legal ruling in God’s creation. Based on the foregoing, He claims that if the law is prescribed by Sharīʿa, not only is the legal ruling derived from primary legal sources, but the right shall also be justified by way of a verdict clarifying the fact that has given rise to the law to be implemented in the given instance. Therefore, abduction, the contributor asserts, can offer an account for the nature of Islamic jurisprudence, its ramifications and its function of the tradition as being important factors of the logic of the legal system of Islam. Uncertainty, however, does exist concerning the compatibility between logic of Islamic Law and deductive logic of Modern State Law, which is viewed as a product of Western legal thinking.

Mr. Sami Al-Daghistani (Double PhD candidate, Leiden University and WWU Münster, visiting scholar, MESAAS Columbia University, The Netherlands and Germany), addresses the concept of maṣlaḥa and its connection to the area of Islamic legal and economic thought as discussed by eminent Muslim scholars both in the past and at present time. The contributor indeed seeks to tackle a number of issues, such as the way in which maṣlaḥa may be embodied within Islamic legal reasoning, the type of meaning relayed by maṣlaḥa, the economic and/or legal reading it postulates and the notion of whether or not law, ethics and scriptural sources play an equal role in the development of the concept of maṣlaḥa in economic terms. The concept of maṣlaḥa has always been part of the theory of Islamic Law, but has seldom been tackled within the context of economic thought. The contributor offers a historical account of the legal system of Islam and the concept of maṣlaḥa within the context of Islamic economics, placing special emphasis on the work of AlGhazālī. He then investigates the Islamic economic jurisprudence and Islamic economic theory as understood and discussed by influential theoreticians of economic studies in Islam, with credence lent to the view that Islamic economics is strongly linked to the essence of Islamic legal reasoning. The contributor makes use of Mohammad Al-Sadr’s thoughts in viewing Islamic economics as a principle and not a science. He examines legal foundation of Islam with its normativity, casting lights on the notion that legal norms have been included within Islamic economic reasoning, an idea which resides in the concept that patterns of Islamic Law have been constructed socially alongside certain features of Islamic economic reasoning. He claims that in spite of the fact that literature of Islamic Law and that of Islamic economics are founded on primary Islamic legal and economic sources ‘The Qurʾān and Prophetic Traditions’, they, however, lie in ethical cosmology which is even more than just being an exact theological matter.

5.3 Custom as a Source of Islamic Law and Juristic Views of an Early Andalusian Mālikī Jurist

Dr. Abbas Mehregan (Independent Scholar, Germany), deals with the relationship between law and society and its crucial role played in the formulation of women’s law within Islamic legal system from the sociological point of view. The contributor examines the economic, political and social structures specific to women’s law in the Arabian Peninsula in the pre-Islamic era, presenting certain laws based on Arabs’ customs which were rejected by Islamic Law and others which were modified and then accepted by Islamic jurisprudence. Certain legal issues have been particularly tackled, such as marriage, polygamy, rights to inheritance, blood money, the process of testimony and accepted forms of evidence in legal cases, the system of giving fatwā, the exclusion of women from the judiciary, rules concerning the veil and right of guardianship of children in the case of divorce. The contributor claims, through close examination of the way in which the Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) introduces Islamic Law, that custom should be regarded as a source of Islamic Law alongside other commonly known legal sources of Islamic jurisprudence.

Dr. Daniel Vazquez-Paluch (House of Wisdom, United Kingdom), collects the juristic opinions held by an early Andalusian jurist: ʿĪsā ibn Dīnār (d. 212/827), in an attempt to explore and analyse his legal views and thoughts. The contributor closely examines his detailed and explanatory notes and comments written on Almuwaṭṭaʾ as documented in the legal juristic issues which he had elaborated on in Mustakhraj by Alʿutbī (d. 255/869), beside profound analysis of his lengthy discussion with his student Ibn Muzayn. There has been a great focus on the Mālikī Muwaṭṭaʾ in Alandalus since a very early era where the Mālikī School of Law had been the dominant legal authority and Ibn Alqāsim had been the reliable interpreter of the Mālikī Madhhab. The contributor claims that the foregoing represents challenges to Calder’s dating of the Mālikī Muwaṭṭaʾ and Melchert’s dating of Western Mālikism.

5.4 Islamic Finance and Legal Translation Between English and Arabic

Dr. Fahad Al-Zumai and Dr. Mohammed Al-Wasmi (Kuwait University, Kuwait), address the industry of Islamic finance as being relatively new, though growing rapidly to be the prevailing finance industry in the Middle East as well as North Africa. Islamic finance industry is chiefly built upon Sharīʿa provisions, including the prohibition of usury. The contributors point to the emphasis accorded by Islamic Law scholars to the ethical dimension of Islamic finance industry to the extent that it can be viewed as a fruitful solution to the de facto crony capitalism. The present financial crisis has created crucial challenges to the industry of Islamic finance, but has, at the same time, given this industry a golden opportunity to merge into prevailing finance and be an influential industry. The contributors evaluate the industry of Islamic finance in relation to the current financial crisis, in an attempt to explore whether or not the ethical foundation of Islamic finance institutions can distinguish these institutions from conventional finance institutions. They offer a relatively succinct account of finance in Islam, followed by discussion of the governance framework structure of Islamic finance institutions and the crucial role played by the organs thereof. A comparison is made between the ethical construction of Islamic finance institutions and that of conventional finance institutions. The contributors claim that there exists a great ethical failure of the present universal financial system in coping with the current financial crisis.

Dr. Hanem El-Farahaty (University of Leeds and University of Mansoura, United Kingdom and Egypt), addresses the concept of legal translation between English and Arabic as there has been a global pressing need for legal translation due to asylum seeking and immigration reasons, a matter which demands further research to be conducted on this particular field. Owing to the fact that there are clear differences between legal English and legal Arabic at diverse levels, different translation problems often arise when a particular legal text is rendered between the aforementioned languages, ranging from linguistic problems, culture-specific problems to system-bound problems. The contributor examines different ways of rendering lexical elements between legal English and legal Arabic. She explores and analyses different problematic areas in legal translation between English and Arabic, suggesting plausible strategies in coping with such acute translation areas. These include culture-specific and system-bound terms, specialized terms, archaic terms, doublets as well as triplets. The contributor tackles the common problems confronting the translator when rendering a particular legal text from English into Arabic and vice versa, with some light cast on the lexical problems encountered in English–Arabic and Arabic–English legal translation. Also, she presents certain procedures that need to be followed when rendering legal terms between English and Arabic. The contributor claims that the translation of lexical legal terms between English and Arabic demands strong acquaintance with the linguistic and legal systems of both English and Arabic, professional training, well-defined corpora and up-to-date electronic dictionaries.

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Alwazna, R.Y. Islamic Law: Its Sources, Interpretation and the Translation of It into Laws Written in English. Int J Semiot Law 29 , 251–260 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9473-x

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Published : 21 March 2016

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• The Encyclopaedia of Islam Available in print and electronic formats with three editions dating back to 1913.
• Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an Encyclopedia covering all aspects of the Qur’an including qur’anic terms, concepts, personalities, place names, cultural history and exegesis as well as essays on important themes and subjects within qur’anic studies. more... less... English language encyclopedia covering all aspects of the Qur’ān including qur’ānic terms, concepts, personalities, place names, cultural history and exegesis as well as essays on important themes and subjects within qur’ānic studies. This site also includes 62 Early Printed Western Qur’āns Online and the Electronic Qur’ān. Concordance.
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• Encyclopaedia of Islamic law v. 1. Concepts of Islamic law; v. 2. Foundations of Islamic law; v. 3. Islamic law in practice; v. 4. Civil law in Islam; v. 5. Family law in Islam; v. 6. Law of marriage and divorce in Islam; v. 7. Law of Waqf in Islam; v. 8. Criminal law in Islam; v. 9. Jurisprudence in Islam; v. 10. Law of governance in Islam
• Encyclopedia of Islamic law: a compendium of the views of the major schools Based on two main Arabic sources: al-Fiqh alal madhdhab al-arbaah and al-Fiqh alal madhdhab al-khamsa
• Oxford Islamic Studies Online This authoritative, dynamic resource brings together the best current scholarship in the field for students, scholars, government officials, community groups, and librarians to foster a more accurate and informed understanding of the Islamic world. Oxford Islamic Studies Online features reference content and commentary by renowned scholars in areas such as global Islamic history, concepts, people, practices, politics, and culture, and is regularly updated as new content is commissioned and approved. more... less... Oxford Islamic Studies Online features articles, biographies, primary texts, Qur'anic materials, and books by scholars in areas such as global Islamic history, concepts, people, practices, politics, and culture. Articles come from The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Islamic World: Past and Present, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, The Oxford History of Islam, and What Everyone Needs To Know About Islam. The Koran Interpreted (a verse translation by A.J. Arberry) and The Qur'an (a prose translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem) are included, as is the first electronic version of Hanna E. Kassis's A Concordance of the Qur'an.

• A dictionary of Islam by Thomas Patrick Hughes
• Qāmūs al-muṣṭalaḥāt al-dīnīyah = Dictionary of religious terms / ʻIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad Najīb
• "Hukukı islâmiyye ve ıstılahatı fıkhiyye" kamusu / Ömer Nasûhi Bilmen In Turkish, with some Arabic text.
• Muʻjam muṣṭalaḥāt alfāẓ al-fiqh al-Islāmī / Sāʼir Baṣmahʹjī
• Farhang-i vāzhagān va iṣṭilāḥāt-i Islāmī / Parvīz Āzhīdah Persian and English.
• Muʻjam al-muṣṭalaḥāt al-fiqhīyah / taʾlīf Ibrāhīm Ismāʻīl al-Shahrakānī
• Farhang-i fiqh : muṭābiq-i maẕhab-i ahl-i bayt, ʻalayhim al-salām / taḥqīq va taʼlīf Mūʾassasah-i Dāʻirat al-Maʻārif-i Fiqh-i Islāmī ; zīr-i naẓar-i Maḥmūd Hāshimī Shāhrūdī

Primary Sources - Qur'an and Hadith

There are many authoritative translations in other languages available in our collection.  Please consult the reference staff if you have a specific title or would like to inquire about translations in another language.

The sources of Islamic Law are the Qur'an and the Sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet).   Most of these texts have been digitized in various translations and are available on the web. 

In addition to the web collections below, the Harvard University Libraries hold tremendous collections on the sources--in Arabic and English as well as Western European Languages.   Please consult HOLLIS or a reference librarian for further assistance.

• The Noble Qur'an Translations of the Qur'an.
• Al-Tafsir.com Translations of the Holy Qur’an in various languages. Please note that not all of the following translations are authentic.
• The Holy Qur'an : text, translation & commentary / by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. English and Arabic in parallel columns.
• The Gracious Quran : a modern-phrased interpretation in English / Ahmad Zaki Hammad. Arabic-English parallel ed.
• Collections of Ahadith Collections include: Sahih Bukhari صحيح البخاري Sahih Muslim صحيح مسلم Sunan al-Nasa'i سنن النسائي Sunan Abi Dawud سنن أبي داود Jami` al-Tirmidhi جامع الترمذي Sunan ibn Majah سنن ابن ماجه
• al-Jāmiʻ al-kabīr li-kutub al-turāth al-Islāmī wa-al-ʻArabī [CD-ROM] : akthar min 30000 mujallad ḥāsūbī, akthar min 2600 ʻunwān kitāb, akthar min 1400 ʻunwān yanfaridu bi-hi al-barnāmaj, al-iṣdār 5.0, al-naskhah al-dhahabīyah al-muṭawwarah, 9Extrenal H.D) A large collection of Islamic and Arabic heritage books Ver 5.0. Law School Islamic Ref - hard disk is installed on both PCs next to Islamic Law Collection in L1N.

A good place to start is the Harvard online public catalogue called Hollis .  General books dealing with Islamic law are catalogued under Islamic Law .   Other topics are catalogued with the topic-- marriage for example and Islamic law.  To find the application of Islamic law in a specific country, search for Islamic Law and a particular country like Egypt .   At Harvard, most materials on Islamic law will be found in HLSL, Widener and Andover-Harvard Theological Library . If you are interested in knowing about books at other libraries, WorldCat is an excellent resource.  Here you will access to the collections at major research libraries all over the world.  Search terms are the same as for Hollis.

• Islamic Law: A Bibliography of Recent Works Published in English This bibliography covers English-language books and articles within books that discuss Islamic law. The titles have all been published since 2003 and are held in the Library of Congress. The listing is divided into three sections: works on Islamic law in general, works on the history of Islamic law, and works devoted to a specific area of law.
• Oxford Bibliography on Hadith by J.A.C. Brown Lists major hadith collections in Arabic and translations.
• An Introduction to Islamic Law by Joseph Schacht
• An introduction to Islamic law by Wael B. Hallaq
• A history of Islamic law by N.J. Coulson
• Between God and the sultan : a history of Islamic law by Knut Vikør
• Islamic law : from historical foundations to contemporary practice by Mawil Izzi Dien
• al-Madkhal ilá dirāsat al-Sharīʻah al-Islāmīyah / Rābiḥ Bin Gharīb
• al-Madkhal li-dirāsat al-fiqh al-Islāmī / li-Ṣalāḥ Muḥammad Abū al-Ḥājj
• al-Sharīʻah al-Islāmīyah kamāl fī al-dīn wa-tamām lil-niʻmah / Muḥammad Riyāḍ
• al-Madkhal ilá al-sharīʻah wa-al-fiqh al-Islāmī / ʻUmar Sulaymān al-Ashqar
• Madkhal li-dirāsāt al-sharīʻah al-Islāmīyah / Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī
• Materials from the Harvard libraries on Islamic law and jurisprudence Preset catalog search so you can browse the Harvard libraries' collection.
• Islamic Manuscripts (HathiTrust Digital Library) Over 900 Islamic manuscripts from U. of Michigan.
• Index Islamicus, 1665-1905: a bibliography of articles on Islamic subjects in periodicals and other collective publications Print edition of the above index for earlier years (1665-1905).
• JSTOR This full-text database spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. more... less... Includes all titles in the JSTOR collection, excluding recent issues. JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. For complete lists of titles and collections, please refer to http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html.
• PAIS International (Harvard Login) Multidisciplinary resource. "PAIS indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The database is comprised of abstracts of thousands of journal articles, books, directories, conference proceedings, government documents and statistical yearbooks." more... less... PAIS International indexes the public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care, International in scope, PAIS indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The database is comprised of abstracts of thousands of journal articles, books, directories, conference proceedings, government documents and statistical yearbooks.
• Academic Search Premier (Harvard Login) A multi-disciplinary database that includes citations and abstracts from over 4,700 scholarly publications (journals, magazines and newspapers). more... less... Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a multi-disciplinary database that includes citations and abstracts from over 4,700 scholarly publications (journals, magazines and newspapers). Full text is available for more than 3,600 of the publications and is searchable.
• Islam in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa The bibliography contains several thousand references to secondary literature in European languages about Islam in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa, published between 1960 to 2005. more... less... The bibliography of Islam in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa has been prepared in conjunction with the African Studies Centre (ASC) and the Centre d’Etude d’Afrique Noire project “Islam, the Disengagement of the State, and Globalization in Sub-Saharan Africa,” that was funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which resulted in a Conference held at the UNESCO in May 2005. ####The bibliography contains several thousand references to secondary literature in European languages about Islam in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa, published between 1960 to 2005. Many of the entries also have abstracts produced by the ASC library. Select entries have abstracts from the authors, publishers, and journals themselves.
• Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern & Islamic law The Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern & Islamic Law is a US-based law journal that covers relevant topics in Middle Eastern, Islamic, and comparative law.
• Arab law quarterly Published on behalf of: the Society of Arab Comparative and International Law.
• Islamic law and society Provides a forum for research in the field of classical and modern Islamic law, in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Articles are published in French or English.
• UCLA journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law The UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law contains the full text of documents that are dedicated to the scholarly review of legal issues that are of importance to Muslims and Near Easterners.
• The journal of Islamic law & culture The Journal of Islamic Law & Culture contains the full text of documents that are dedicated to the understanding of Islamic law and culture in America's legal, religious, and Muslim communities.
• Majallat al-sharīʻah wa-al-dirāsāt al-Islāmīyah Alternate title: Journal of shari’a and Islamic studies. Articles are mainly in Arabic with some in English.
• Islamic Law & Law of the Muslim World eJournal The only Social Science Research Network (SSRN) journal that focuses on this area of law, the Islamic Law and Law of the Muslim World Research Paper Series at New York Law School.

Legal periodical indexes generally only allow you to search the title, citation, abstract, keywords (sometimes author-supplied), and subject terms given to a journal article, rather than the full text.  A benefit to using a legal periodical index is that it will include all issues and volumes of a given journal, without any gaps in coverage, back to a certain date. (For example, Legaltrac's contents go back to 1980.  Full text databases can have gaps in coverage, sometimes many years' worth, for an individual journal.

• Index to Legal Periodicals and Books [Harvard Law only] Provides citations to articles in over 800 legal periodicals such as law reviews, bar association journals, yearbooks, institutes, and government publications from August 1981 to the present. Focus of content is mainly on journals from Anglo-American countries.
• Legal Journals Index, only on Westlaw [Harvard Law only] Indexes articles from legal journals published in the United Kingdom and Europe as well as journals covering topics pertaining to the laws of the European Community and its Member States. Coverage is from 1986 to present.
• Le Doctrinal Indexes French language law journals.

Domestic Legal Systems

This tab includes the sources on opinions, judgments and finding aids such as digests or indexes from the various states with Islamic law component (historical and/or contemporary).  Most of the compilations include domestic relations cases in the vernacular and English translations, if available.

• al-Fatāwá al-Islāmīyah min Dār al-Iftāʼ al-Miṣrīyah Fatwas issued by Dār al-Iftāʼ al-Miṣrīyah. 39 volume set; coverage period 1895-2012
• Official Gazette - al-Jarīdah al-rasmīyah
• al-Maḥkamah al-Dustūrīyah al-ʻUlyā - Egyptian Constitutional Court cases Egyptian Constitutional Court cases are also available on the Court's website, http://hccourt.gov.eg/Pages/Rules/Rules_Search.aspx.
• Mawsūʻat al-fatāwá al-muʼaṣṣalah min Dār al-Iftāʼ al-Miṣrīyah Fatwas issued by Dār al-Iftāʼ al-Miṣrīyah. Coverage 2013 supplements the above set.
• Himpunan putusan kasasi peradilan agama Supreme Court’s decisions in cases involving Islamic family law for Indonesian Muslims. Published in 2001.
• Himpunan putusan kasasi peradilan agama Supreme Court’s decisions in cases involving Islamic family law for Indonesian Muslims. Published in 2000.
• Official Gazette - Rūznāmah-ʾi rasmī-i Jumhūrī-i Islāmī-i Īrān. Official Gazette
• Ḥudūd : jarāʼim-i khilāf-i akhlāq-i ḥasanah
• Iran Criminal Code
• al-Qarārāt al-istiʾnāfīyah fī al-aḥwāl al-shakhṣīyah
• al-Qaḍāʼ al-sharʻī al-Jaʻfarī: ijtihādāt - nuṣūṣ
• Muṭālaʻāt al-niyābah al-ʻāmmah al-istiʼnāfīyah ladá al-maḥkamah al-Sharʻīyah al-Sunnīyah al-ʻUlyā
• Shariah law reports Quarterly case reporter of Malaysian shariah judgments.
• Mudawwanat al-usrah wa-al-ʻamal al-qaḍāʾī al-Maghribī Covers cases on domestic relations.
• Toma Legal Retrieve IP access. Access may be limited to users with a valid Harvard ID. Full text of all legislation in force (1990- ); full text of selected judgments of Court of Appeal of Nigeria, federal high courts of Nigeria, and states’ high courts of Nigeria; legal precedents and business letters; Supreme Court of Nigeria judgments (1956- ); investment, petroleum, company, and taxation laws of Nigeria; court rules; judgments of West African Court of Appeal (WACA) and appeals from WACA to Privy Council.
• 37 years’ excellent digest on family laws, 1961 to 1997: with digest of Islamic laws on family matters
• Complete digest on Mahomedan law
• Select ruling on family laws in Pakistan
• Twenty eight years’ digest on Muslim laws, 1947-1974 : containing custody of minor, dower, gift, guardianship, maintenance, marriage, pre-emption. Muslim personal law (Shariat) application act (X of 1973), Muslim family laws ordinance (VIII of 1961)
• The Board of Quazis’ law reports: with a digest Cases from the Board of Quazis from 2001-2010 on domestic relations.
• al-Mawsūʻah al-ḥadīthah fī al-anẓimah al-Saʻūdīyah
• Istanbul Kadi Sicilleri Available in print and searchable online, http://www.kadisicilleri.org/index.php, this 40-volume set includes Istanbul court records from the Ottoman period.

Other Resources

Muslim Law Systems and Mixed Systems with a Muslim Law Tradition provided by University of Ottawa

• JuriGlobe - World Legal Systems
• Fatawa - Muslim World League (Makkah) The Muslim World League was founded in accordance with a resolution adopted during the meeting of the General Islamic Conference, which was held in Holy Makkah on the 14th of Dhul Hijjah 1381 Hijra corresponding to the 18th May 1962. Affiliations: - The United Nations Organization: Observer in consultative status with the ECOSOC. - Organization of the Islamic Conference: Observe status in attendance at all meetings and conferences. - ISESCO: Member - UNICEF: Member
• Islamic Legal Studies Program (Harvard Law School) Harvard Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP), established in 1991, is a research program that seeks to advance knowledge and understanding of Islamic law. As stated in its statement of objectives (incorporated into the terms of its major grants), the Program is dedicated to achieving excellence in the study of Islamic law through objective and comparative methods. It aims to foster an atmosphere of open inquiry that embraces many perspectives: Muslim and non-Muslim, scholar and practitioner, contemporary and classical, Sunni and Shi'i, law and religion. It seeks to promote appreciation of Islamic law as one of the world's major legal systems.
• Bibliographic Resources for Middle East & Islamic Studies (Columbia University) This is a selective guide to major reference resources on Middle Eastern history, religion, literature, politics, and culture, available at Columbia University Libraries. The guide includes encyclopedias, biographical and subject-specific dictionaries, foreign-language dictionaries, research guides and subject bibliographies, and relevant databases for periodical articles and other writings.
• Islamic Heritage Project IHP is a multi-disciplinary collection of high-quality digital reproductions of more than 270 Islamic manuscripts, more than 300 published texts, and 58 maps from Harvard's renowned library and museum collections. Subjects represented include religious texts and commentaries; Sufism; history, geography, law, and the sciences (astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine); poetry and literature; rhetoric, logic, and philosophy; calligraphy, dictionaries and grammar, as well as biographies and autobiographical works. Coverage 10th-20th centuries CE. more... less... IHP is a multi-disciplinary collection of high-quality digital reproductions of more than 270 Islamic manuscripts, more than 300 published texts, and 58 maps from Harvard's renowned library and museum collections. Subjects represented include religious texts and commentaries; Sufism; history, geography, law, and the sciences (astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine); poetry and literature; rhetoric, logic, and philosophy; calligraphy, dictionaries and grammar, as well as biographies and autobiographical works.
• Islamic Manuscripts Cataloging Project (Princeton University) Online Cataloging for the New Series of Islamic Manuscripts at Princeton Cataloging is now available online for the entire collection of the nearly 2200 manuscripts comprising the New Series of Islamic Manuscripts in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. The New Series constitutes the premier collection of predominantly Shi`ite manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere and among the finest in the world. The online records have been created as part of the Islamic Manuscripts Cataloging and Digitization Project, to improve access to these rich collections and share them worldwide through digital technology. Researchers can now locate Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts by searching the Library’s online catalog: http://catalog.princeton.edu.

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40 Historical Research On Islamic Law

Lena Salaymeh is Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law.

• Published: 10 September 2018
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This chapter provides a partial sketch of recent Islamic legal historiography in the West, with modest suggestions for future research. It suggests that historical research on Islamic law is a burgeoning field facing many of the political and normative challenges of scholarship in Islamic studies more generally. It would behove this field to confront these challenges more directly both by acknowledging them and by recognizing how they influence the contemporary writing of historiography. In turn, it is important to resist allowing contemporary politics to dictate the borders and content of historical research on Islamic law. With a wide array of sources and questions that have not yet been investigated thoroughly, historical research on Islamic law is a field that will continue to grow and to transform in unpredictable ways.

I. Introduction

Islamic law is not a self-evident category of analysis. Defining and understanding the category is a subject of both academic and popular debates. These debates reflect the long history (more than 1400 years), broad geographical expanse, and extensive demographic diversity of the Islamic legal tradition. Muslims (numbering approximately 1.6 billion today) have understood and produced Islamic law in dissimilar and changing ways throughout history. Nevertheless, there is a conventional presumption that Islamic law is the result of Islamic legal hermeneutics anchored in canonical Islamic scriptural texts. There is an additional, less common, presumption that Islamic law is generated by an ‘Islamic state’, even when the state does not rely on Islamic legal hermeneutics. 1 Historical research on Islamic law inevitably confronts these (and other) challenges of defining Islamic law, by including and excluding historical evidence in ways that construct meanings for ‘Islamic law’. In this chapter, I suggest some ways in which the subjects and the methods of historical research on Islamic law contribute to defining Islamic law today.

This chapter centres on historical research about Islamic law in the Western academy, which has increased significantly in recent years. I concentrate on contemporary scholarship in English, although I also relied on (somewhat outdated) surveys of scholarship in German and Spanish. 2 The dynamics motivating historical legal research on Islamic law in the Muslim world are beyond the scope of this chapter. 3 Although this survey of recent historical research on Islamic law is broad, I emphasize some of the key political questions and methodological conundrums that frame this body of scholarship. Moreover, this chapter is not comprehensive: scholarship on the early modern and modern histories of Islamic law and scholarship on Islamic legal history outside the Arab world are under-represented.

II. Political Dynamics

While there are multiple motivations for historical research on Islamic law in the Western academy, political dynamics deserve particular attention. Undoubtedly, contemporary geo-politics—principally the prevalent and incorrect presumption that Westerners are in a civilizational conflict with Muslims—provokes much scholarly (and non-scholarly) interest in the history of Islamic law. In addition, because anti-Muslim propaganda exploits the mythology of ‘sharia law’ (sic), Islamophobia influences—directly and indirectly—much scholarship on Islamic law. 4 These circumstances (the ‘green threat’ and Islamophobia) operate in both the background and the foreground of Islamic legal studies, as scholars react to and against these contemporary dynamics in their historical research. Just as Western colonialism shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on Islamic law, so too does Western neo-imperialism shape contemporary Islamic legal studies. 5 This is why critiques of Orientalism, which extend beyond the work of Edward Said into other theoretical approaches (including subaltern and critical secularism theory), remain productive bases for analysing historical research on Islamic law. 6 Notably, critiques of Orientalist scholarship are not directed at scholars, but rather at scholarly methods. 7 As opposed to identity, it is the power dynamics and methods of Western scholarship and Islamic objects of study that significantly shape historical research on Islamic law.

Since Islam plays a unique role in Western self-conceptualizations and mythologies, historical research on Islamic law reflects the broad, dialogical process by which the West defines itself as the opposite of its ultimate Other, Islam. 8 Historical research on Islamic law has the tendency to characterize Western law and Islamic law as opposing ideal-types. Conventional assumptions presume that Western law is liberal, democratic, restrained by the rule of law, facilitative of capitalism, and secular. Correspondingly, conventional assumptions misconstrue Islamic law as conservative, despotic, irrational, limiting of economic growth, and ‘religious’.

First, because Westerners celebrate liberalism as a ‘superior’ ideology, identifying or negating the presumed illiberalism of Islamic law is a common preoccupation of historical scholarship. Accordingly, contemporary Islamic law scholarship anachronistically investigates modern, liberal notions, including freedom, rights, and equality; much of the historical scholarship on the Islamic legal status of non-Muslims, women, and slaves falls under this category. 9 In other words, Islamic legal historiography often imposes modern socio-legal concepts, particularly modern rights discourse (human, animal, environmental, gender, minority, and LGBTIQ+). Second, because Westerners celebrate the modern nation-state and liberal democracies as the ideal forms of government, important themes of historical research are Islamic governance and codification (or ‘modernization’) of Islamic law. Here again, the prevailing assumption is that premodern Islamic states could not have developed or nurtured modern, liberal nation-states.

Third, because Westerners perceive the ‘rule of law’ as limiting violence, much contemporary scholarship on Islamic law scrutinizes ostensibly ‘harsh’ criminal or warfare laws. The historical normativity of Islamic law is effaced by the implicit tendency to compare Islamic legal history with idealized notions about contemporary Western law. Fourth, because Western capitalism is presumed to explain the West’s ascendance, many studies of Islamic legal history investigate property relations (especially trusts) and some commercial laws, which are presumed to have limited capital development in the Muslim world. 10 Fifth, because Western law is understood uncritically as secular, much scholarship on Islamic legal history emphasizes its ‘religious’ dimensions, despite the anachronism of applying the notion of religion to premodern history. 11 Religion is not a transhistorical category, but rather the modern construct of secularism; religion has no clear or consistent meaning. Misinterpreting the Islamic legal tradition as ‘religious’ has far-reaching limitations on Islamic legal historiography.

The interrelated and broad contemporary notions of liberalism, democracy, the rule of law, capitalism, and secularism often skew historical legal research on Islamic law by projecting anachronistic concepts. Since it is not possible to find these contemporary concepts in the historical record, much scholarship contributes to the widespread misconception that Islamic law is deficient or that it is always and already historical, such that it is incompatible with modernity. Put differently, because anachronistic notions dominate historical research on Islamic law, Islamic law tends to be perceived as a historical artefact.

III. Overview of Contemporary Historical Research

Although Islamic law is commonly viewed as a historical relic, the predominant methods for researching Islamic law are not historical. For the most part, research on Islamic legal history is conducted from the perspectives of textual studies (typically, Near Eastern studies), social history, anthropology, or political science, depending on the period of study. Generally, textual studies dominate late antique and medieval historiography, social history dominates early modern historiography, and anthropology and political science dominate modern historiography. The prominence of particular disciplines within each historical period reflects that scholars who specialize in each period usually receive dissimilar disciplinary trainings in the Western academy. In turn, the prevalence of certain disciplines within specific periods of historical research tends to frame each historical period within a limited set of questions. By way of example, the dominance of textual studies confines historical inquiry to close textual questions; similarly, the dominance of social history confines scholarship to social, rather than jurisprudential questions. Moreover, because history departments rarely hire (or train) historians of premodern Islam and law schools rarely hire (or train) specialists in Islamic law, historical research on Islamic law is at the margins of historical studies and of legal studies. 12

While these broad disciplinary boundaries frame historical research on Islamic law, the particularities of historical sources influence how each historical period is studied. In what follows, I offer a rough, brief, and chronological overview of Islamic legal history and corresponding scholarship. 13

A. Late Antique (610 to 800)

Late antique Islamic law encompasses the beginning of the Islamic movement up to approximately the beginning of the ninth century. The Prophet and his legal and political successors administered Islamic law, simultaneously drawing upon customary, regional traditions and articulating new legal perspectives. Muslim legal actors fused pre-Islamic legal traditions with Islamic ones. Jurists used historical research to determine the legal value of events during the Prophet’s life because these events have precedential value. Jurists generally adopted one or a combination of two approaches: the rationalist approach anchored jurisprudence in logical thinking, and the traditionist approach anchored jurisprudence in sacred, textual sources. Law was developed and taught in legal circles, networks, and eventually, formal legal schools. This period was legally heterodox, as a wide variety of approaches to Islamic law coexisted.

Late antique Islamic legal historiography has expanded significantly in recent years as several scholars have dedicated monographs to the first centuries of Islamic legal history. 14 Much of this scholarship attempts to trace the ‘origins’ of Islamic law and to identify the legal actors who laid the ‘foundations’ for Islamic law. The emphasis on ‘origins’ reflects the methodological dominance of philology, especially source-criticism. 15 Source-criticism consists of comparing surviving textual sources and, based on a set of allegedly neutral principles, determining which source is older or more authentic. While source-criticism may provide a means of arranging several manuscript variants, it is not a basis for the writing of history. Because source-criticism is an influential method in the field, discovering the date and true ‘origins’ of Islamic law in pre-Islamic legal traditions remains a problematic objective in Islamic legal historiography. 16 Islamic law, however, does not have a date of birth because it simply began when the Islamic movement began. In addition, Islamic law does not have an authentic or true ‘origin’ because the Islamic legal tradition, like all legal traditions, is hybrid. Indeed, the Islamic legal tradition recycles pre-Islamic and Islamic laws in ways that are immeasurable and often indiscernible. Put differently, Islamic law does not have an ‘origin’ because, in late antiquity, non-Islamic and Islamic laws were enmeshed in a shared ‘Near Eastern’ legal culture.

Source-criticism inculcates a broad approach to sources that emphasizes not only searching for origins, but also reporting the contents of textual sources, rather than analysing them theoretically or historically. This is why much of the scholarship in late antique Islamic legal studies synthesizes the contents of legal texts (whether documentary or narrative) with little, if any, analysis. 17 The philological method emphasizes micro-textual translation and summary, rather than macro-contextual and relational analysis. Some scholars have debated and considered the implications of philology’s dominance in the study of late antique (and medieval) Islamic legal historiography. 18 However, few scholars have engaged alternative methods for exploring late antique Islamic legal history. One important exception is Hocine Benkheira, who implements a historical-anthropological approach to late antique Islamic legal historiography. 19 Interdisciplinary methods are crucial to facilitate a shift from micro-textual questions to macro-historical questions in late antique Islamic legal historiography. A significant subject area of potential research is integrating a wide array of narrative and documentary sources in order to scrutinize the reciprocal relationship between late antique Islamic legal practice and juridical scholarship. By way of example, we know little about how Umayyad judicial practices shaped jurisprudential activity and texts. 20 In short, late antique historiography should focus on Islamic law beyond texts and should read texts more critically and contextually.

B. Medieval (800 to 1500)

In the medieval era, Muslim jurists became professionalized, paralleling the ʿAbbāsid empire’s development of an increasingly more complex bureaucratic system. Muslim jurists debated the role of oral law—the orally transmitted traditions about the legal practices of the earliest generations of Muslims—in Islamic jurisprudence. A combination of challenges to the authority of oral reports and increasing availability and accessibility of materials for writing (particularly paper) led to the intensifying importance of recorded (written) tradition-reports ( aḥadīth ) and other textual sources in Islamic jurisprudence. In turn, the growing reliance on textual sources shifted Islamic jurisprudence away from the reconstruction of social-historical precedents and towards textual interpretation. Muslim scholars gradually differentiated historical and legal genres as the juristic profession became more specialized. Hundreds of legal schools of thought consolidated or disappeared, leaving several orthodox legal schools, each of which articulated slightly distinct jurisprudential principles. Thus, canonization of legal texts coincided with consolidation of legal orthodoxy, which was reinforced in the tradition of legal commentaries. Legal education occurred in and outside of formal, endowed colleges, which were centres of education and political activity. During the medieval period, Islamic legal orthodoxy coalesced.

Whereas late antique historiography generally focuses on the ‘origins’ of Islamic law, medieval historiography is concerned with the ‘origins’ of the orthodox Islamic jurisprudential methodology ( uṣūl al-fiqh ), which are associated with ‘foundational’ texts or scholars. 21 Just as Islamic law does not have ‘origins’, orthodox Islamic jurisprudence does not have ‘origins’. Here again, textual studies directs scholarship towards close readings that are dislocated from their socio-political and historical surroundings. Consequently, medieval legal histories that situate Islamic law within its various socio-political surroundings are relatively rare. 22 Many aspects of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence are the result of socio-political and historical conditions in the medieval era that were common to Islamic and non-Islamic (particularly Jewish) legal traditions. Medieval Islamic law operated within and reflected Islamicate legal culture, encompassing both Muslims and non-Muslims. 23 Historically situated comparisons with medieval, non-Islamic legal traditions would be very productive. While some scholars have integrated discursive and legal theoretical approaches to the study of medieval Islamic law, interdisciplinary approaches remain infrequent. 24

Many studies of early medieval Islamic law have revealed significant details and nuances about legal education 25 and the consolidation of orthodox legal schools. 26 While this is an important and rich area of scholarship, it has the unintended consequence of minimizing non-orthodox legal schools (or heterodox legal activity) and the role of the state. 27 (An exception is the Ẓāhirī legal school, which has received significant scholarly attention. 28 This scholarly interest may reflect the significance of contemporary textual-literalist approaches to Islamic law.) That is, the orthodox legal schools were not the only loci of legal activity. For example, as Farḥāt Ziyādah noted, much scholarship neglects the procedural rules that were essential to upholding justice. 29 Similarly, texts of juristic disagreement ( ikhtilāf ) have not been thoroughly researched, particularly as to how this genre contributed to the consolidation of legal orthodoxy and identification of legal heresy. Several important studies have been dedicated to Mamluk legal history, but this area remains under-researched. 30 In addition, the geographic range of medieval Islamic legal historiography remains quite limited.

C. Early Modern (c. 1500 to 1800)

State practices and bureaucracies both expanded and unified the dominance of Islamic law in the early modern era. Whereas previous empires permitted multiple legal schools to coexist in many localities, Ottoman courts became the primary venue for litigation throughout the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman state became intimately involved in every aspect of judicial activity—from training jurists and court personnel, to selecting judges, to promulgating legal codes. 31 Similarly, Awrangzīb, Mughal Emperor of India, ordered the compilation of an Islamic law compendium based on the most authoritative legal opinions of the Ḥanafī school; the result is known as al-Fatāwá al-ʿĀlamgīrīyah (compiled between 1664–1672), and the text was an important reference work throughout South Asia and beyond for generations. The Ottomans designated the Ḥanafī legal school as the empire’s official school, appointed a chief jurist, and established law schools in the areas they conquered; as a result, law students began to migrate away from other Islamic legal schools as a step towards a career in the Ottoman bureaucracy.

Early modern Islamic legal historiography is dominated by studies based on Ottoman court records. 32 Islamic legal history under the Mughal Empire (1526–1540, 1555–1857) and the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) are understudied. 33 Ottoman legal historiography is rarely comparative and, therefore, infrequently situates Ottoman law within global legal trends. Expanding the geographical coverage of early modern Islamic legal historiography would likely alter prevalent understandings of this period. Ottoman legal historiography is also overly focused on Ottoman archival records (especially courts records), which are often used for social (rather than legal) history. 34 A potentially important source for research is the legal decrees of Ottoman jurists, which have been understudied. 35 In addition, jurisprudential texts and juristic networks have not been explored fully. Nevertheless, Ottoman historiography has made important contributions to Islamic legal historiography by refuting stereotypes about Islamic law and by highlighting the role of the state and non-state groups in shaping Islamic law.

Ottoman legal historiography has been instrumental in refuting Max Weber’s stereotype of Kadijustiz , which caricatures Islamic law as an irrational, arbitrary legal system, the antithesis of liberal and predictable, modern (secular) law. 36 Recent scholarship has used Ottoman court records to illustrate that Ottoman judges followed well-known procedural and substantive rules. Indeed, Ottoman judges were bureaucrats and their method of adjudication was as systematized as other Ottoman administrative acts. 37 Ottoman legal historiography has also overturned the stereotype that the Ottoman state was despotic. Numerous studies demonstrate that a combination of tradition and bureaucracy prevented a sultan from indiscriminately using his power. 38 For example, Sultan Süleyman (1465–1520), known as ‘the Lawgiver’, acquired a reputation for justice by punishing Ottoman administrators who had abused their power. By delineating the role of the Ottoman state in shaping Islamic law, Ottoman legal historiography has contributed significantly to complicating the oversimplification that Islamic law is ‘jurists’ law’.

D. Modern (1800 to 1950)

In the modern era, the transition from empires to nation-states transformed Islamic law. The Ottoman Empire initiated reforms ( Tanẓīmāt , reorganization) in the nineteenth century. The Gülhane Rescript (1839) confirmed the civil and economic rights of all Ottoman subjects, while endorsing Islamic law as the source of Ottoman law. The Ottomans promulgated multiple legal codes that were implemented by state courts ( nizāmiyyah ). After 1869, the Ottoman Empire followed a civil code known as the Mecelle-i Ahkam-i Adliye (the Ottoman civil code); structured like the French civil code, the Ottoman civil code integrated both Islamic legal principles and a variety of Islamic substantive and procedural laws. Under the Sykes-Picot agreement, the British and the French enacted a post-First World War division of the Ottoman Empire into colonies. Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial administrators composed handbooks (or legal guides) about Islamic law that had long-lasting influences. Post-colonial, Muslim-majority states established hybrid legal systems, largely based on colonial law.

Modern historiographies of Islamic law concentrate on how the Ottoman legal reform movement, colonialism, and codifications transformed Islamic law. 39 This scholarship illustrates that legal changes that began during the Ottoman Empire intensified after its disintegration, the establishment of colonial regimes, and the later founding of quasi-independent nation-states. There is significantly less scholarship on legal transformations in the Mughal Empire. Colonial officers/scholars played a key role in promoting the notion that Islamic legal texts differed from Islamic legal practices. 40 Consequently, scholars often project these colonial assumptions of a ‘gap’ between theory and practice onto historical texts. This has resulted in relatively less scholarly attention to Islamic law beyond the modern nation-state. For example, there was significant scholarly discussion, commentary on, and explanation of the codification of Islamic law by contemporaneous jurists; yet, modern legal historiography in the West has rarely investigated these local responses to codification processes. More specifically, scholars have analysed the work and legacy of Egyptian jurist ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī without fully investigating resistance to his codification projects. 41 Similarly, much modern legal historiography focuses on top-down codifications and legal reforms of Islamic law within particular states, without exploring the bottom-up production of Islamic legal thought in those areas. The legal changes of the modern era primarily resulted in the emulation of the legal systems of European states, in terms of juristic training, court procedures, and legal doctrines. Modern historiography would benefit from more explicitly comparative and contextual studies that place Islamic legal practices within regional socio-economic transformations. 42 Doing so would clarify the complex and diverse processes of how legal discourses and practices were transformed in the transition from early modern empires into modern nation-states.

IV. An Agenda for Future Scholarship

In briefly summarizing Islamic legal history and legal historiography, the previous section sought to illustrate that there are two primary challenges for historical research on Islamic law: avoiding anachronistic historical questions and adopting a broader range of methods in order to ask different kinds of historical questions. Because Islamic legal historiography tends to be insular and overly technical, it is important for future scholarship to engage with theoretical debates in law, history, religious studies, and critical theory. In what follows, I offer some suggestions for future historical research on Islamic law. (These suggestions do not encompass the temporal and geographic breadth of Islamic legal studies.)

A. Terms and Concepts

A primary challenge for historical research on Islamic law is applying terms and concepts that are historically (or contextually) appropriate; this is a challenge for all historical research, but it is compounded in this case because contemporary political questions so often provoke Islamic legal-historical research. Within the field, discrepancies in the use of the terms ‘Islamic law’, ‘ sharīʿah ’ (divine law), and ‘ fiqh ’ (juristic interpretations of divine law) are the result of deep conceptual variations, inflected by contemporary issues in the understanding of law. Yet historical research on Islamic law is only implicitly involved in debates about the meaning of ‘law’. How to define ‘law’ underlies the late antique historiographic debate on Islamic law’s beginning, since scholars often project narrow or inaccurate definitions of law on the historical record. Likewise, the debate in medieval historiography on when, how, and who initiated orthodox Islamic jurisprudence ( uṣūl al-fiqh ) revolves around what constitutes a jurisprudential text. Early modern legal historiography is often preoccupied with defining Ottoman law in relation, or in opposition, to Islamic law. Modern legal historiography seems either to question the existence of Islamic law in the modern world or to presume its omnipresence. 43 Many of these historiographic fixations could be avoided if scholars adopted explicit and rigorous definitions of law and of Islamic law that are transhistorical. By way of example, when Buskens and Dupret claim that colonial administrators and scholars invented the concept of ‘Islamic law’, it is because they define law as positive law. 44 However, not all law is positive law; moreover, Islamic law encompasses positive law and other forms of law. In other words, Islamic law is a normative legal praxis and not a legal code. 45

A related conceptual challenge within the field concerns the role of the state in Islamic legal history; while Islamic law is often described as jurists’ law, the state played a significant role in shaping the legal tradition, particularly through the patronage of particular legal schools. 46 The role of the state in Islamic legal history is understudied in the late antique period, as compared to the medieval, early modern, and modern periods, for which scholarship ascribes increasing significance to the state. Although in recent years there have been more studies of the relationship between Islamic law and Islamic states across historical periods, this area needs more scrutiny. 47 For instance, it is important to interrogate why scholars tend to use the categories of Islamic law and Ottoman law, but not Umayyad law, ʿAbbāsid law, Fāṭimid law, or Mamluk law. The subcategory of Ottoman law reflects the significance of the Ottoman archives in differentiating the Ottoman legal tradition. Nevertheless, we should reconsider the substantive reasons for why we use some state-based legal categories and not others. Relatedly, the analytic category of Islamic administrative law has been underexplored. In general, research on Islamic law and governance indicates the urgency with which scholars have taken up the contemporary question of Islamic statehood, but this research would benefit from more engagement with Islamic political thought and political theory. 48

When historical research on Islamic law confronts the meaning of ‘law’ or the role of the state, it inevitably grapples with the false question of how to fit Islam within the modern category of religion. 49 In general, historical research on Islamic law is conducted without sufficient attention to the relevance of law and irrelevance of religion as categories of historical analysis. Too much historical scholarship on Islamic law begins with the false presumption that religion is a separate sphere (usually separate from the secular, or the state). Integrating critical secularism theory would prevent secular assumptions from clouding historical research on Islamic law. Recent scholarship in critical secularism theory demonstrates that secularism is not the neutral or objective opposite of religion; instead, secularism constructs the category of religion in various ways depending on the specific location and subject. In particular, exploring how modern, secular nation-states define, transform, and obscure Islamic law to suit their purposes is an important topic of research that depends on historical understanding. 50 That is, to perceive how the modern nation-state constructs Islamic law as ‘religious law’, it is necessary to contrast this secular construction with historical Islamic legal traditions.

B. Global and Regional Legal Histories

Historical research on Islamic law is implicated so deeply in contemporary, rather than historical, concerns that it is often decontextualized and disconnected from global or regional historical dynamics. An important potential area of research is situating Islamic law in global historical trends. By correlating Islamic legal practices to corresponding practices in global legal traditions, we might observe patterns or historical shifts that would otherwise be indiscernible. In addition, there are specific areas of Islamic law that would benefit from more historically situated analysis of global practices. For instance, historical research on Islamic slavery laws would profit from comparative engagement with recent scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade. Islamic laws of slavery appear, on the one hand, to reflect regional, customary practices and, on the other hand, to have been applied selectively. 51

Furthermore, regional legal history would enrich Islamic legal historiography by situating Islamic law within local trends. Some scholarship on the late antique and medieval eras has examined the relationships between Byzantine, Sasanian, rabbinic Jewish, and Islamic legal traditions; however, much of this scholarship has focused on derivative, linear connections. Horizontal analyses are less frequent, yet would be more illuminating. Three potentially significant areas of historical intersection between Islamic and regional non-Islamic legal traditions are the relationship between oral and written legal traditions, the systematization of jurisprudence, and the canonization of legal texts. For the early modern and modern eras, it would be especially beneficial to situate Ottoman law in relationship to Mughal and Safavid law. Collaborative scholarship would be a highly productive means of exploring the interrelationships between regional legal traditions of a specific period. Relatedly, global and regional legal historiographies may contribute to the necessary task of decentring the Arab world from Islamic legal historiography. Too much Islamic legal historiography ignores Islamic law in geographic areas that are presumed to be ‘peripheral’. For instance, Islamic legal history in places like Indonesia or parts of sub-Saharan Africa have not been thoroughly investigated.

C. Materiality and Book History

While traditional papyrology and numismatics have contributed to Islamic legal historiography, they have also advanced a problematic dichotomization between documentary and narrative sources. 52 By moving beyond this dichotomy and the assumptions embedded within it, recent scholarship in textual studies would greatly benefit historical research on Islamic law. Specifically, critical philology, critical bibliography, and book history integrate close textual analysis with an anti-positivist orientation and with theoretical engagement; this approach greatly improves many of the deficiencies in conventional philological approaches. Moreover, existing narratives of Islamic legal history do not integrate fully factors related to materiality, including the production of manuscripts, introduction of paper, changes in the cost of scribal work, and implications of printing (especially its relationship to codification). 53 Brinkley Messick’s historical ethnography of legal textual authority offers a productive model for scholars. 54 Combining critical theory and historical anthropology, Messick uses the materiality of texts to explore questions of authority in Yemen from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. In addition, some recent scholarship has examined the canonization of specific Islamic legal literature. 55 However, in general, historical research on Islamic law should incorporate critical insights from materiality and book history more thoroughly into both macro- and micro-narratives of Islamic legal history.

D. Specialization, Multi-Disciplinarity, and Theory

Some scholars of Islamic legal history specialize in particular areas of law (such as criminal law or family law). Nevertheless, deeper specialization, coupled with methodological variety and theoretical engagement, would enhance scholarship in the field. For instance, scholars specializing in medieval Islamic international law should not only investigate comparative international legal history, but also legal theory and political theory. Similarly, scholarship on Islamic trusts would be enriched by more in-depth study of legal and economic theory, as well as comparative analyses. Likewise, historical research in Islamic legal ethics, particularly bioethics, would yield interesting results if it incorporated comparative and theoretical work. 56 Sustained engagement with theoretical literature has yielded promising results in, by way of example, late antique legal studies. A growing number of scholars of late antiquity are pursuing historical research on late antique law that integrates multiple historical sources, interdisciplinary approaches, and legal theory. In a recent symposium issue on ancient legal historiography, the diverse contributions shared an engagement with modern legal theory and moderate use of close textual analysis. 57 Dislocating the close reading of texts from its dominant position in research on Islamic law would open up possibilities for Islamic law to be a site for investigating historical and theoretical questions of importance outside the field of Islamic legal studies.

An acutely important area of historical research on Islamic law that has been under-historicized and under-theorized is gender and sexuality. Although a growing area of research, studies of women, sexuality, and Islamic legal history are usually not comparative or theoretically engaged. 58 By focusing on the global and regional situations of women—not only Muslim women—in particular historical periods, scholars can avoid perpetuating problematic stereotypes. Much of the literature on the status of women in Islamic legal history is not only a-historical and decontextualized, it is theoretically unsophisticated and thereby contributes, often unintentionally, to problematic ideological projects, especially imperialism. 59 Some historical research on Islamic law incorrectly presumes that the category of ‘woman’ is universal or transhistorical. By recognizing the nuances and varieties of women’s experiences, critical feminist theory and queer theory would greatly enhance historical research on Islamic law and women, as well as other disempowered groups.

E. Interrogating Orthodox Narratives of Islamic Legal History

Prevalent methodologies in Islamic studies oriented the study of Islamic legal history around the falsification of Islamic historical sources. Consequently, scholars tended to treat Islamic historical sources as objects of technical dissection: they evaluated the chains of transmission and the texts of tradition-reports in order to determine authenticity or reliability. Few scholars have analysed how these sources narrate their own histories. In other words, how did medieval scholars narrate late antique Islamic legal history? And how did early modern scholars narrate late antique and medieval Islamic legal history? Put differently, how Islamic sources composed Islamic legal history has not been the subject of critical scrutiny. In writing the history of Islamic law, orthodox Muslim scholars not only proposed narratives about the past, they constructed boundaries for orthodoxy using the past as the template for authority and legitimacy. The stories that Muslim scholars told about the past of the Islamic legal tradition deserves more detailed scrutiny and critical engagement. Sociology of religion and critical theory would provide important tools for investigating these histories.

6. Islamic Legal History in Contemporary Controversies

A potentially productive avenue of future research concerns exploring how distinct actors use Islamic legal history in present controversies, particularly as an ideological tool. By way of example, during the Arab uprisings of 2010/2011, a variety of figures used Islamic legal history either to justify or to delegitimize popular uprisings. In their legal decrees or more extensive legal writings, contemporary jurists, pseudo-jurists, and activists pointed to Islamic history as offering precedents for or against overthrowing authoritarian regimes. 60 How did these various contemporary Muslim actors and activists fashion Islamic legal history? Anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements across the Muslim world mine Islamic legal history for precedents and for justifications of their activities. Similarly, both state and non-state actors turn to Islamic legal precedents to condemn or to justify the use of violence. Contemporary Islamic legal opinions on the use of violence in war or in rebellion are engaged directly with Islamic legal history in ways that have not been fully explored. In short, how contemporary Muslim movements and actors employ Islamic legal history is a promising area of future research.

V. Conclusion

This chapter provides a partial sketch of recent Islamic legal historiography in the West, with modest suggestions for future research. Historical research on Islamic law is a burgeoning field facing many of the political and normative challenges of scholarship in Islamic studies more generally. It would behoove this field to confront these challenges more directly both by acknowledging them and by recognizing how they influence the contemporary writing of historiography. In turn, it is important to resist allowing contemporary politics to dictate the borders and content of historical research on Islamic law. With a wide array of sources and questions that have not yet been investigated thoroughly, historical research on Islamic law is a field that will continue to grow and transform in unpredictable ways. Adopting more interdisciplinary methods and integrating more comparative and theoretical approaches will greatly enrich the field.

Recommended Reading

Late antique (610–800).

Wael B. Hallaq , ‘ Groundwork of the Moral Law: A New Look at the Qurʾān and the Genesis of Sharīʿa ’ ( 2009 ) 16 Islamic Law and Society 239 ff

Google Scholar

Harald Motzki , The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan fiqh Before the Classical Schools [Die Anfänge der islamischen Jurisprudenz: Ihre Entwicklung in Mekka bis zur Mitte des 2./8. Jahrhunderts (1991)] Islamic History and Civilization. Studies and Texts, Vol. 41. (trans. Marion H. Katz , Brill, 2002 )

Medieval (800–1500)

Ahmed El Shamsy , The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2013 )

Google Preview

Yossef Rapoport , Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008 )

Muhammad Qasim Zaman , Religion and Politics Under the Early ʿAbbāsids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Brill, 1997 )

Early Modern (c. 1500–1800)

Guy Burak , The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Ḥanafī School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2015 )

Boğaç A. Ergene , Local Court, Provincial Society, and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankiri and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Brill, 2003 )

Haim Gerber , State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (State University of New York Press, 1994 )

Modern (1800–1950)

Iza R. Hussin , The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2016 )

Scott Alan Kugle , ‘ Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia ’ ( 2001 ) 35 Modern Asian Studies 257 ff

Brinkley M. Messick , The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (University of California Press, 1993 )

David S. Powers , ‘ Orientalism, Colonialism, and Legal History: The Attack on Muslim Family Endowments in Algeria and India ’ ( 1989 ) 31 Comparative Studies in Society and History 535 ff

I have differentiated between Islamic jurisprudence and Muslim legalities, defining the latter as legal hermeneutics anchored in a state or other legal system that may or may not be Islamic and with a population that may or may not be majority Muslim. Lena Salaymeh , ‘Commodifying “Islamic Law” in the U.S. Legal Academy’ (2014) 63 Journal of Legal Education 640 ff .

See Hilmar Kruger , ‘The Study of Islamic Law in Germany: A Review of Recent Nooks on Islamic law’ (2000–2001) 15 Journal of Law and Religion 303 ff ; Delfina Serrano Ruano , ‘Spanish Research on Islamic Law, 1990–1999’ (2000) 15 Journal of Law and Religion 331 ff . A useful, though outdated, bibliography is Laila Al-Zwaini and Rudolph Peters , A Bibliography of Islamic Law, 1980–1993 (1994) .

For an overview of a bit of this scholarship, see Chibli Mallat , ‘Islamic Law Research in the Twentieth-Century Middle East (1998) 8 Asian Research Trends 109 ff .

Léon Buskens , Baudouin Dupret , ‘The Invention of Islamic Law: A History of Western Studies of Islamic Normativity and Their Spread in the Orient’, in François Pouillon , Jean-Claude Vatin (eds.), After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations (2015) 31–47 ff .; Wael B. Hallaq , ‘The Quest for Origins or Doctrine? Islamic Legal Studies as Colonialist Discourse’ (2002) 2 U.C.L.A. Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law 1 ff .; David S. Powers , ‘Orientalism, Colonialism, and Legal History: The Attack on Muslim Family Endowments in Algeria and India’ (1989) 31 Comparative Studies in Society and History 535 ff .; John Strawson , ‘Encountering Islamic Law’, in Critical Legal Conference Held in New College (1993), < http://www.iium.edu.my/deed/lawbase/jsrps.html > (accessed 1 March 2018) ; John Strawson , ‘Islamic law and English texts’ (1995) 6 Law and Critique 21 ff .

On subaltern theory, see Ranajit Guha (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (1997) . On critical secularism theory, see Talal Asad , Genealogies of Religion (1993) ; David Scott , Charles Hirschkind (eds.), Powers of the Secular Modern (2006) .

Lena Salaymeh, ‘Imperialism, not Imperialists: The ‘Good Orientalist’ and Nineteenth-Century German Orientalism’ (forthcoming).

Said made this point in Edward Said, Orientalism (1978). For a recent engagement with liberalism’s construction of Islam as the Other, see Joseph A. Massad , Islam in Liberalism (2015) .

On liberal assumptions about women and Islamic law, see Lena Salaymeh, ‘Imperialist Feminism and Islamic Law’, Hawwa (forthcoming).

On Islamic laws related to trusts ( awqāf ), see Peter C. Hennigan , The Birth of a Legal Institution: The Formation of the Waqf in Third-Century A.H. Ḥanafī Legal Discourse (2004) ; Baber Johansen , The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants’ Loss of Property Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafite Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (1988) ; Powers (n. 5 ); Richard van Leeuwen , Waqfs and Urban Structures: The Case of Ottoman Damascus (1999) ; Farhat J. Ziadeh , ‘Property Rights in the Middle East: From Traditional Law to Modern Codes’ (1993) 8 Arab Law Quarterly 3 ff . On the problematic claim that Islamic law prevented capitalism, see Timur Kuran , The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (2013) .

On the limitations of applying ‘religion’ to non-Western traditions and premodern history, see Asad (n. 6 ). On the anachronism of the category of ‘religion’ in Islamic legal historiography, see Lena Salaymeh , ‘Taxing Citizens: Socio-Legal Constructions of Late Antique Muslim Identity’ (2016) 23 Islamic Law and Society 333 ff .

Scholars of late antique or medieval Islamic history or Islamic law typically teach in Near Eastern Studies or Religious Studies departments. On how law schools in the United States influence Islamic law scholarship, see Salaymeh (n. 1 ).

For an encyclopaedic overview of Islamic legal history, see Lena Salaymeh , ‘Islamic law’, in James D. Wright (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (2015) .

Patricia Crone , Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (2002) ; Yasin Dutton , The Origins of Islamic Law: The Qurʾan, the Muwaṭṭaʾ and Madinan ʻamal (1999) ; Wael B. Hallaq , The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (2005) ; Steven C. Judd , Religious Scholars and the Umayyads: Piety-Minded Supporters of the Marwanid Caliphate (2014) ; Harald Motzki , The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan fiqh Before the Classical Schools [Die Anfänge der islamischen Jurisprudenz: Ihre Entwicklung in Mekka bis zur Mitte des 2./8. Jahrhunderts (1991)] ( Marion H. Katz trans. 2002) .

Lena Salaymeh , ‘ “Comparing” Jewish and Islamic Legal Traditions: Between Disciplinarity and Critical Historical Jurisprudence’ (2015) 2 Critical Analysis of Law 153 ff .

I elaborated on the connection between the search for Islamic ‘origins’ and methodological limitations, as well as alternative frameworks for Islamic legal historiography in The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (2016).

Kruger (n. 2 ) 309.

See, e.g., the debate between Hallaq and Powers: Wael B. Hallaq . ‘Groundwork of the Moral Law: A New Look at the Qurʾān and the Genesis of sharīʿa’ (2009) 16 Islamic Law and Society 239 ff .; David S. Powers , ‘Wael B. Hallaq on the Origins of Islamic Law: A Review Essay’ (201) 17 Islamic Law and Society 126 ff .

See Mohammed Hocine Benkheira , ‘Un libre peut-il épouser une esclave? Esquisse d’histoire d’un débat, des origines à al-Shāfi’ī (m.204/820)’ (2008) 84 Der Islam 246 ff ; ‘Jouir sans enfanter? Concubines, filiation et coït interrompu au debut de l’Islam’, (2013) 90 Der Islam 245 ff ; ‘L’impuissance sexuelle, motif légal de rupture du lien matrimonial’ (2014) 21 Islamic Law and Society 1 ff .

On Umayyad judges and jurists, see Judd (n. 14 ). On the significance of using Umayyad judicial activity to understand contemporaneous jurisprudence, see Muhammad Khalid Masud et al. ‘Qāḍīs and Their Courts: An Historical Survey’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud et al. (eds.), Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and Their Judgements (2006) 11 ff .

Wael B. Hallaq , A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni usul al-fiqh (1997) ; Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (2001); Christopher Melchert , The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th–10th Centuries C.E. (1997) ; ‘Traditionist-Jurisprudents and the Framing of Islamic Law’ (2001) 8 Islamic Law and Society 383 ff .

David Stephan Powers , Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500 (2002) ; David S. Powers, ‘Four Cases Relating to Women and Divorce in Al-Andalus and the Maghrib, 1100–1500’ in Masud, Dispensing Justice (n. 20 ) 383–409 ff.; Maya Shatzmiller , ‘Women and Wage Labour in the Medieval Islamic West: Legal Issues in an Economic Context’ (1997) 40 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 174 ff ; Her Day in Court: Women’s Property Rights in Fifteenth-Century Granada (2007).

These ideas are explored in detail in Salaymeh (n. 16 ).

Sherman A. Jackson , ‘From Prophetic Actions to Constitutional Theory: A Novel Chapter in Medieval Muslim Jurisprudence’ (1993) 25 International Journal of Middle East Studies 71 ff ; Baber Johansen , Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim fiqh (1999) .

George Makdisi , Religion, Law and Learning in Classical Islam (2002) ; Joseph E. Lowry et al. (eds.), Law and Education in Medieval Islam: Studies in Memory of Professor George Makdisi (2004) .

Peri Bearman et al., The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress (2006) ; Nimrod Hurvitz , ‘Schools of Law and Historical Context: Re-examining the Formation of the Ḥanbalī madhhab ’ (2000) 7 Islamic Law and Society 37 ff ; Nurit Tsafrir , The History of an Islamic School of Law: The Early Spread of Hanafism (2004) .

Sherman A. Jackson , Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (1996) ; Muhammad Qasim Zaman , ‘The Caliphs, the ʿulamāʾ, and the Law: Defining the Role and Function of the Caliph in the Early ʿAbbāsid Period’ (1997) 4 Islamic Law and Society 1 ff .

Camilla Adang et al., Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba: The Life and Works of a Controversial Thinker (2013) ; Amr Osman , The Ẓāhirī Madhhab (3rd/9th-10th/16th century): a textualist theory of Islamic law . Studies in Islamic law and society (2014).

Abī Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAmr ibn Muhayr al-Shaybānī al-Khaṣṣāf (d. 874; Iraq) and Abī Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Rāzī al-Jaṣṣās (d. 982; Iraq), Kitāb adab al-qāḍī (Farḥāt Ziyādah ed., 1978).

Yossef Rapoport , Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (2008) 1 .

Baki Tezcan , The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (2010) .

Notable works include James E. Baldwin , Islamic Law and Empire in Ottoman Cairo (2017) ; Boğaç A. Ergene , Local Court, Provincial Society, and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankiri and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (2003) ; Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim , Pragmatism in Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (2017) ; Başak Tuğ , Politics of Honor in Ottoman Anatolia: Sexual Violence and Socio-Legal Surveillance in the Eighteenth Century (2017) .

On Mughal law, see .e.g., Muhammad J. Akbar , The Administration of Justice by the Mughals (1948) ; M. L. Bhatia , The Ulama, Islamic Ethics and Courts Under the Mughals: Aurangzeb Revisited (2006) .

See Dror Ze’evi , ‘The Use of Ottoman Shari‘a Court Records as a Source for Middle Eastern Social History: A Reappraisal’ (1998) 5 Islamic Law and Society 35 ff . A notable exception to the early modern focus on social history is Guy Burak , The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Ḥanafī School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2015) .

Colin Imber , Ebu’s-su ‘ ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (2008) .

Max Weber , Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1978) .

Haim Gerber , State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (1994) .

See Ramazan Acun , Fatma Acun ‘Demand for Justice and Response of the Sultan: Decision Making in the Ottoman Empire in the Early 16th Century’ (2007) 2 Balkan Studies 125 ff .; Feridun M. Emecen , ‘The Ottoman Legal System in the Reign of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent’, in Tülây Duran (ed.), The Ottoman Empire in the Reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1988) 111–26 ff .

Iza R. Hussin , The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (2016) ; Powers (n. 5 ); Scott Alan Kugle , ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia’ (2001) 35 Modern Asian Studies 257 ff .

See Buskens, Dupret (n. 5 ) 33 (observing that ‘the relationship between theory and practice, which has since become central in the Western study of Islamic law, originated in these scholarly and political debates of the nineteenth century’).

On the Sanhūrī code, see Guy Bechor , The Sanhuri Code, and the Emergence of Modern Arab Civil Law (1932 to 1949) (2007) .

Fahad A. Bishara , Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean 1780–1950 (2017) .

On the absence of Islamic law, see Wael B. Hallaq , ‘Can the Shari‘a Be Restored?’, in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad , Barbara Freyer Stowasser (eds.), Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity (2004) 21–54 ff . The perspective of omnipresence is present in contemporary propaganda about Islamic law.

See Buskens, Dupret (n. 5 ) 31 (arguing that ‘the phenomenon of normativity in Muslim societies existed before and was independent of the introduction of the concept of Islamic law by colonial administrators and scholars’).

Put differently, Islamic law is not a set of legal doctrines. It is a legal tradition in which doctrines are generated through recourse to Islamic sacred texts.

See, e.g., Tsafrir (n. 26 ); Burak (n. 34 ).

Zaman (n. 27 ); Benjamin Jokisch , Islamic Imperial Law: Harun Al-Rashid’s Codification Project (2007) ; Jackson (n. 27 ); Hussin (n. 39 ); Gerber (n. 37 ).

Wael B. Hallaq , The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (2013) .

Examples include Fred McGraw Donner , Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (2012) ; Shahab Ahmed , What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) .

See Hussein A. Agrama , ‘Sovereign Power and Secular Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?’, in Mateo Taussig-Rubbo et al. (eds.), After Secular Law (2011) 503 ff (observing that ‘the state is always drawing a line between the religious and the secular, and reserving its sole authority to do so’).

On slavery, see Kecia Ali , Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010) ; Jonathan E. Brockopp , Early Mālikī Law: Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam and His Major Compendium of Jurisprudence (2000) .

On papyrology in Islamic legal historiography, see Salaymeh (n. 16 ) ch. 1.

On materiality in the Islamic world, see George N. Atiyeh , The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (1995) ; Adam Gacek , The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (2012) .

Brinkley M. Messick , The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (1993) .

Ahmed El Shamsy , The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (2013) ; Jonathan Brown , The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni hadith Canon (2011) .

Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina , Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Principles and Application (2009) .

Clifford Ando , ‘The Varieties of Ancient Legal History Today’ (2016) 3 Critical Analysis of Law 1 ff ; Caroline Humfress (ed.), Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law (forthcoming) .

Khaled Abou El Fadl , Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women (2001) ; Ali (n. 51 ); Hina Azam , Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (2015) ; Scott Alan Kugle , Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslims (2013) ; Judith E. Tucker , Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law (2008) .

For an overview, see Salaymeh (n. 9 ).

On the use of Islamic history in the Egyptian coup of 2013, see Amr Osman, ‘Past contradictions, contemporary dilemmas: Egypt’s 2013 coup and early Islamic history’. (2015) 24:2 Digest of Middle East Studies 303–26.

Associate Professor, Tel Aviv Law. For responding to my informal survey about historical research on Islamic law, I thank Guy Burak, Amr Osman, David Powers, SherAli Tareen, and Luke Yarbrough. For comments on this piece, I thank Guy Burak, Rhiannon Graybill, Amr Osman, SherAli Tareen, and the participants in a Tel Aviv Law workshop dedicated to this volume.

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Islamic Law

Introduction, hadith/qawliyyah, shi'a hadith.

• Secondary Sources of Islamic Law
• General Sources on Islam

The Arabic term for source in Islamic law is dalil (guide). [2]  There are two primary sources of Islamic law: Quran and Sunnah. Quran and Sunnah make up Shariah (pathway), the source of all principles of Islamic law. [3]

2. Khan, A.A. et. al. Encyclopaedia of Islamic Law. v.1 Concepts of Islamic Law . New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2006. p.59.

3. Ramadan, H.M. Understanding Islamic Law . Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2006. p.4.

The literal meaning of Quran is that which should be recited, read, or studied and refers to the book embodying the revelation from Allah to Prophet Muhammad [4] . There is only one authentic and uniform text of the Quran in Arabic that is in use throughout the Muslim world. The Arabic text is often found in the English translations, some of which are provided below. However, there are many translations and interpretations (discussed later) of the Arabic text. The leading translations in English [5]  are available in print and online.

4. Id., at 11.

5. Kidwai, A.R. Translating the Untranslatable – A Survey of English Translations of the Qur’an. The Muslim World Book Review, Summer 1987.

Online English Translations

• Ali, Abdullah Yusuf.  The Meaning of the Holy Qur'an .
• Shakir, M.H.  The Holy Qur’an .
• Abdel Haleem, M. A.  The Qurʼan.

Selective list of online translations:

• http://www.qurandatabase.org/
• http://tanzil.info/
• Online Quran Project,  http://community.al-quran.info/
• Compared translations,  http://www.islamawakened.com/quran/1/
• http://quran.al-islam.org/

Hadith/Qawliyyah are the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The following sample searches in a library catalog will yield many collections of hadith. Hadith – texts Hadith -- Criticism, interpretation, etc. The six major Hadith collections listed below were collected by Islamic scholars approximately 200 years after Prophet Muhammad's death. These are listed in order of authenticity.

Sunnah is roughly translated as the traditions and practices of Prophet Muhammad. There are three types of Sunnah.

1. The sayings of the Prophet – Sunnah Qawliyyah/Hadith.

2. The actions of the Prophet – Sunnah Al Filiyya.

3. Sunnah Taqrīriyyah, practices prevailing at the time of the Prophet which he did not oppose or prohibit.

There are also Shi’a Collections of Hadith. A subject search in a library catalog, such as WorldCat, for Hadith (Shiites) will yield many sources. The prominent Shi’a collections include Twelver collections, Ismaili, and Mu’tazili. These can also be used as search terms to locate relevant collections.

There are also bibliographies on Hadith; see Brown, Jonathan A.C.. " Hadith ".

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Program in Islamic Law

Call for Papers: Journal of Islamic Law Special Issue

The  Journal of Islamic Law   invites papers that explore encounters between Islamic law and other legal traditions from the 18th through mid-20th centuries. Scholarship on encounters mostly focuses on colonial history, presenting a defeating view of shari’a, seen as having “died” against the intruding forces of colonialism. Indeed, European colonialism greatly affected the operation of Islamic law. Colonial officials, targeting the ulema and the courts, transformed the foundational practices and institutions on which the Islamic legal tradition rested. Yet, it is worth revisiting how Islamic law operated given its flexible nature and the agency of its actors. For example—with some exceptions—we know little about processes of negotiation, dependence, borrowing, jurisdictional jockeying, forum shopping, and entanglements between Islamic legal practices and those of other legal systems. Furthermore, a scholarly understanding of encounters between Islamic law and other legal traditions would greatly benefit from explorations of other regional and temporal spaces—and not just European colonialism—where legal encounters unfolded. This special issue is interested in hosting works on such legal encounters broadly from the 18th to the mid-20th century. Thematically, it seeks to present scholarship that looks at metamorphosis, borrowing, and dialogue between Islamic law or shari’a and other legal traditions in the context of foreign/external influences, colonial powers, and imperial interactions.

We seek articles of  up to 25,000 words.  To signal interest, please submit a proposed title and abstract of  250-500 words  by  November 18, 2022 , using our  online submissions portal . Once accepted, soon thereafter, the  deadline for the submission of full drafts is February 1, 2023 , after which we will go through a process of peer review, a final decision on acceptance, and editing and publication. This special issue of the Journal of Islamic Law is edited by  Dilyara Agisheva  ( [email protected] ), Research Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law, and will be published in Spring/Summer 2023. For further questions, please contact us at [email protected] .

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Muslims and Islam: Key findings in the U.S. and around the world

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Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. The growth and regional migration of Muslims, combined with the ongoing impact of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) and other extremist groups that commit acts of violence in the name of Islam, have brought Muslims and the Islamic faith to the forefront of the political debate in many countries. Yet many facts about Muslims are not well known in some of these places, and most Americans – who live in a country with a relatively small Muslim population – have said they  know little or nothing about Islam .

Here are answers to some key questions about Muslims, compiled from several Pew Research Center reports published in recent years:

How many Muslims are there? Where do they live?

There were 1.8 billion Muslims in the world as of 2015 – roughly 24% of the global population – according to a Pew Research Center estimate . But while Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion (after Christianity), it is the  fastest-growing major religion . Indeed, if current demographic trends continue, the number of Muslims is expected to exceed the number of Christians  by the end of this century .

Although many countries in the Middle East-North Africa region, where the religion originated in the seventh century, are heavily Muslim, the region is home to only about 20% of  the world’s Muslims . A majority of the Muslims globally (62%) live in the Asia-Pacific region, including large populations in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey.

Indonesia is currently the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, but Pew Research Center projects that  India will have that distinction  by the year 2050 (while remaining a majority-Hindu country), with more than 300 million Muslims.

The  Muslim population in Europe  also is growing; we project  10% of all Europeans will be Muslims  by 2050. 

How many Muslims are there in the United States?

According to our estimate , there are about 3.45 million Muslims of all ages in the U.S., or about 1.1% of the U.S. population. This is based on an analysis of census statistics and data from a 2017  survey of U.S. Muslims , which was conducted in English as well as Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. Based on the same analysis, Pew Research Center also estimates that there are 2.15 million Muslim adults in the country, and that a majority of them (58%) are immigrants.

Our  demographic projections estimate  that Muslims will make up 2.1% of the U.S. population by the year 2050, surpassing people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion as the second-largest faith group in the country (not including people who say they have no religion).

A 2013  Pew Research Center report  estimated that the Muslim share of immigrants granted permanent residency status (green cards) increased from about 5% in 1992 to roughly 10% in 2012, representing about 100,000 immigrants in that year.

Why is the global Muslim population growing?

There are two major factors behind the rapid projected growth of Islam, and both involve  simple demographics . For one, Muslims have more children than members of other religious groups. Around the world, each Muslim woman has an average of 2.9 children, compared with 2.2 for all other groups combined.

Muslims are also the youngest (median age of 24 years old in 2015) of all major religious groups, seven years younger than the median age of non-Muslims. As a result, a larger share of Muslims already are, or will soon be, at the point in their lives when they begin having children. This, combined with high fertility rates, will fuel Muslim population growth.

While it does not change the global population, migration is helping to increase the Muslim population in some regions, including North America and Europe.

How do Americans view Muslims and Islam?

A  Pew Research Center survey  conducted in 2017 asked Americans to rate members of nine religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” from 0 to 100, where 0 reflects the coldest, most negative possible rating and 100 the warmest, most positive rating. Overall, Americans gave Muslims an average rating of 48 degrees, similar to atheists (50).

Americans view more warmly the seven other religious groups mentioned in the survey (Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Mormons). But views toward Muslims (as well as several of the other groups) are now warmer than they were a few years ago; in 2014, U.S. adults gave Muslims an average rating of 40 degrees in a similar survey.

Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party gave Muslims an average rating of 39, considerably cooler than Democrats’ rating toward Muslims (56).

This partisan gap extends to several other questions about Muslims and Islam . Indeed, Republicans and Republican leaners also are more likely than Democrats and those who lean Democratic to say they are very concerned about  extremism in the name of Islam , both around the world (67% vs. 40%) and in the U.S. (64% vs. 30%). In addition, a December 2016 survey found that more Republicans than Democrats say Islam is likelier than other religions to encourage violence among its believers (63% vs. 26% of Democrats). And while most Americans (69%) believe there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in the U.S. today, views are again split by party: 85% of Democrats and those who lean Democratic and 49% of Republicans and GOP leaners hold this view.

Republicans also are more likely than Democrats to say that Islam is not part of mainstream American society (68% vs. 37%) and that there is a natural conflict between Islam and democracy (65% vs. 30%).

About half of Americans (49%) think at least “some” U.S. Muslims are anti-American, greater than the share who say “just a few” or “none” are anti-American, according to a  January 2016 survey . Views on this question have become much more partisan in the last 14 years (see graphic). But most Americans do not see widespread support for extremism among Muslims living in the U.S., according to a February 2017 survey . Overall, 40% say there is not much support for extremism among U.S. Muslims, while an additional 15% say there is none at all. About a quarter say there is a fair amount of support (24%) for extremism among U.S. Muslims; 11% say there is a great deal of support.

How do Europeans view Muslims?

In spring 2016,  we asked residents  of 10 European counties for their impression of how many Muslims in their country support extremist groups, such as ISIS. In most cases, the prevailing view is that “just some” or “very few” Muslims support ISIS, but in Italy, 46% say “many” or “most” do.

The same survey asked Europeans whether they viewed Muslims favorably or unfavorably. Perceptions varied across European nations: Majorities in Hungary, Italy, Poland and Greece say they view Muslims unfavorably, while negative attitudes toward Muslims are much less common in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe. People who place themselves on the right side of the ideological scale are much more likely than those on the left to see Muslims negatively.

What characteristics do people in the Muslim world and people in the West associate with each other?

A 2011 survey asked about  characteristics Westerners and Muslims may associate with one another . Across the seven Muslim-majority countries and territories surveyed, a median of 68% of Muslims said they view Westerners as selfish. Considerable shares also called Westerners other negative adjectives, including violent (median of 66%), greedy (64%) and immoral (61%), while fewer attributed positive characteristics like “respectful of women” (44%), honest (33%) and tolerant (31%) to Westerners.

Westerners’ views of Muslims were more mixed. A median of 50% across four Western European countries, the U.S. and Russia called Muslims violent and a median of 58% called them “fanatical,” but fewer used negative words like greedy, immoral or selfish. A median of just 22% of Westerners said Muslims are respectful of women, but far more said Muslims are honest (median of 51%) and generous (41%).

What do Muslims around the world believe?

Like any religious group, the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims vary depending on many factors, including where in the world they live. But Muslims around the world are  almost universally united  by a belief in one God and the Prophet Muhammad, and the practice of certain religious rituals, such as  fasting during Ramadan , is widespread.

In other areas, however, there is less unity. For instance, a Pew Research Center  survey of Muslims in 39 countries  asked Muslims whether they want sharia law, a legal code based on the Quran and other Islamic scripture, to be the official law of the land in their country. Responses on this question vary widely. Nearly all Muslims in Afghanistan (99%) and most in Iraq (91%) and Pakistan (84%) support sharia law as official law. But in some other countries, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia – including Turkey (12%), Kazakhstan (10%) and Azerbaijan (8%) – relatively few favor the implementation of sharia law.

How do Muslims feel about groups like ISIS?

Recent surveys show  that most people in several countries with significant Muslim populations have an unfavorable view of ISIS, including virtually all respondents in Lebanon and 94% in Jordan. Relatively small shares say they see ISIS favorably. In some countries, considerable portions of the population do not offer an opinion about ISIS, including a majority (62%) of Pakistanis.

Favorable views of ISIS are somewhat higher in Nigeria (14%) than most other nations. Among Nigerian Muslims, 20% say they see ISIS favorably (compared with 7% of Nigerian Christians). The Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, which has been conducting a terrorist campaign in the country for years, has  sworn allegiance to ISIS .

More generally, Muslims mostly say that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam are  rarely or never justified , including 92% in Indonesia and 91% in Iraq. In the United States, a 2011 survey found that  86% of Muslims  say such tactics are rarely or never justified. An additional 7% say suicide bombings are sometimes justified and 1% say they are often justified.

In a few countries, a quarter or more of Muslims say these acts of violence are at least sometimes justified, including 40% in the Palestinian territories, 39% in Afghanistan, 29% in Egypt and 26% in Bangladesh.

In many cases, people in countries with large Muslim populations are  as concerned as Western nations  about the threat of Islamic extremism, and have become increasingly concerned in recent years. About two-thirds of people in Nigeria (68%) and Lebanon (67%) said in 2016 that they are  very  concerned about Islamic extremism in their country, both up significantly since 2013.

What do American Muslims believe?

Our 2017 survey of U.S. Muslims finds that Muslims in the United States perceive a lot of discrimination against their religious group. Moreover, a solid majority of U.S. Muslims are leery of President Donald Trump and think their fellow Americans do not see Islam as part of mainstream U.S. society. At the same time, however, Muslim Americans overwhelmingly say they are proud to be Americans, believe that hard work generally brings success in this country and are satisfied with the way things are going in their own lives.

Half of Muslim Americans say it has become harder to be Muslim in the U.S. in recent years. And 48% say they have experienced at least one incident of discrimination in the past 12 months. But alongside these reports of discrimination, a similar – and growing – share (49%) of Muslim Americans say someone has expressed support for them because of their religion in the past year. And 55% think Americans in general are friendly toward U.S. Muslims, compared with just 14% who say they are unfriendly.

Living in a religiously pluralistic society, Muslim Americans are more likely than Muslims in many other largely Muslim-majority nations to have a lot of non-Muslim friends. Only about a third (36%) of U.S. Muslims say all or most of their close friends are also Muslims, compared with a global median of 95% in the 39 countries we surveyed .

Roughly two-thirds of U.S. Muslims (65%) say religion is very important in their lives . About six-in-ten (59%) report praying at least daily and 43% say they attend religious services at least weekly. By some of these traditional measures, Muslims in the U.S. are roughly as religious as U.S. Christians, although they are less religious than  Muslims in many other nations .

When it comes to  political and social views , Muslims are far more likely to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (66%) than the Republican Party (13%) and to say they prefer a bigger government providing more services (67%) over a smaller government providing fewer services (25%). And about half of U.S. Muslims (52%) now say homosexuality should be accepted by society, up considerably from 2011 (39%) and 2007 (27%).

What is the difference between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims?

Sunnis and Shiites are two subgroups of Muslims, just as Catholics and Protestants are two subgroups within Christianity. The  Sunni-Shiite divide  is nearly 1,400 years old, dating back to a dispute over the succession of leadership in the Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. While the two groups agree on some core tenets of Islam, there are  differences in beliefs and practices , and in some cases  Sunnis do not consider Shiites to be Muslims .

With the exception of a few countries, including Iran (which is majority Shiite) as well as Iraq and Lebanon (which are split), most nations with a large number of Muslims  have more Sunnis than Shiites . In the U.S., 55% identify as Sunnis and 16% as Shiites (with the rest identifying with neither group, including some who say they are just a Muslim).

Note: This post was updated on Aug. 9, 2017. It was originally published Dec. 7, 2015.

Correction: U.S. Muslim population estimates in this post, including the chart “Number of Muslims in the U.S. continues to grow,” were corrected on Nov. 14, 2017. For details, see  Appendix B: Survey Methodology ,  note 37 , of the report “U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream.”

Related posts:

In many ways, Muslim men and women see life in America differently

U.S. Muslims are religiously observant, but open to multiple interpretations of Islam

Michael Lipka is an associate director focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Hostage Seen in New Video Released by Palestinian Islamic Jihad

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group released on Tuesday a video‮ ‬that appeared to show Israeli hostage Alexander Trufanov, 28, who was kidnapped by militants on Oct. 7.

Similar videos have been released by militant groups in Gaza. Israel has dismissed them as psychological warfare.

In a video released by the family, Trufanov's mother said it made her happy to see her son, but "it was heartbreaking" that he had been a hostage for so long.

Efforts to achieve the release of more than 120 hostages abducted during Hamas' Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel within the framework of a ceasefire deal have so far fallen short.

War in Israel and Gaza

Both sides have blamed the other for the deadlock. Israel has said it cannot accept Hamas' demand to end the war, while the Palestinians want Palestinian prisoners to be released by Israel.

"The proof of life from Alexsander (Sasha) Trufanov is additional evidence that the Israeli government must give a significant mandate to the negotiating team," said a statement from the Hostages Families Forum, which represents the families of the hostages.

(Reporting by Emily Rose; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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Recent UW Law Faculty Scholarship: Standing for Elections in State Courts; White-on-Black Crime: Revisiting the Convict Leasing Narrative; Function Versus Consequence in Restraint of Trade Analysis; and Judicial Biography of Australian Justice, Sir Gerard Brennan Book Review

Here is the latest faculty scholarship appearing in the  University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Papers series  found on SSRN.

• Standing for Elections in State Courts Univ. Ill. L. Rev. (Forthcoming, 2024) by MIRIAM SEIFTER , UW Law School, and Adam B. Sopko, State Democracy Research Initiative

Election-related litigation is soaring. Litigants regularly challenge every aspect of an election cycle, from who can vote to how votes are cast and counted to the certification of results. Courts have thrown out many of these lawsuits on standing grounds. Given the requirements of traditional federal standing doctrine—including the requirement of individualized injury rather than generalized grievances—these dismissals are at least plausible in federal court.

But most election-related lawsuits today are filed in state court, where standing doctrine is and should be different. State courts are not bound by Article III of the U.S. Constitution, have constitutional commitments to democracy and open courts, and typically have more flexible justiciability doctrines. This Essay urges state courts to build on that foundation through a presumptively permissive approach to election standing. State courts fulfill their judicial role by redressing rather than avoiding threats to state-level democracy. And deciding election-related lawsuits on the merits serves important functions of stability, certainty, and finality, as well as confidence in election outcomes.

To be sure, the surge in election-related litigation is suboptimal, and some share of the lawsuits are meritless or brought in bad faith. Our argument is simply that standing doctrine is not the best tool for rejecting these lawsuits. The Essay describes other techniques that courts can use to deal with abusive or burdensome litigation without undermining the openness that is foundational to state judicial systems.

• White-on-Black Crime: Revisiting the Convict Leasing Narrative 2024 Wis. L. Rev. (Forthcoming, 2024) by ION MEYN , UW Law School

Between 1880 and 1915, the Southern criminal legal system enslaved and re-enslaved legally emancipated Black persons. Under the conventional account of this period, the law facilitated and legitimatized these practices, however odious and racially discriminatory. This view—one that critiques as it accepts the legality of the system—provides an explanation for a significant number of cases in which a Black person was convicted and sent to forced labor.

And yet, there is growing evidence that many convictions were not facilitated by law but rather the result of criminal conspiracies to traffic Black victims. County-level arrest data indicates “convictions” occurred in lockstep with the labor demands of businesses that contracted with local state actors. Numerous personal accounts from victims and their families indicate that arrests occurred in the absence of any criminal suspicion. This empirical data suggests many Black “convicts” were instead victims of human trafficking. Because completing these White-on-Black crimes required coordination among multiple parties, a criminal conspiracy was formed that implicated White participants in kidnapping, false imprisonment, perjury, peonage, reckless endangerment, and reckless homicide.

This Essay examines archival evidence that suggests the criminal trafficking of Black men was a common, if not widespread, practice between 1880 to 1915. Under this alternative view the term “convict leasing” is over-inclusive and mislabels these victims of human trafficking. Under the alternative view the historical Black crime rate is not only inflated but fabricated; conversely, the historical White crime rate omits a significant amount of criminal activity. This alternative view centers the criminal conduct of White beneficiaries, inviting a close accounting of their crimes and ill-gotten gains.

• Function Versus Consequence in Restraint of Trade Analysis 53 Univ. Baltimore L. Rev. 387 (2024) by PETER CARSTENSEN , UW Law School

The conventional interpretation of the Sherman Act’s prohibition of agreements in restraint of trade is, at best, ambiguous and uncertain. Conduct such as price fixing among competitors is per se illegal, except when it is not. Although the stated basis for the distinction is unclear, the function of the agreement embodying the restraint explains the apparently conflicting results. Regrettably, courts and commentators usually employ this conventional classification framework that focuses on desirability of the putative consequences of specific agreements. These categories have intuitive appeal but lack substantive coherence. In contrast, the functional approach focuses on the nature of the agreement in restraint of trade itself. The core of this approach is the distinction between naked and ancillary restraints. The policy goal is the preservation of the market process rather than a primary concern for the consequences of specific restraints on any measure of economic welfare. It is the thesis of this essay that the functional approach provides a better method to explain and predict the results of specific cases. It is more consistent with the language and meaning of the Sherman Act. It is also a better method for the analysis of restraints of trade. Because, like the conventional framework, the functional approach necessarily must employ presumptions, its normative merit is contingent on the scope and application of those presumptions.

• Judicial Biography of Australian Justice, Sir Gerard Brennan Book Review Univ. Wis. Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1805 (2024) by WILLIAM H. CLUNE , UW Law School

This is a book review in interview format with me interviewing the book’s author, Jeffrey Fitzgerald. The book is a judicial biography of the famous and influential Australian jurist, Sir Gerard Brennan. Largely in chronological sequence, the book also identifies cross-cutting themes such as the evolution of his jurisprudence over time.

My questions are designed to highlight issues that have parallels in American law, thus introducing the book to American readers. A second focus is the interaction of law and society. Law and society issues pervade the book because it is a longitudinal account of the judge’s encounters with important legal issues that arose in a changing Australian society, his influence on that society, and the corresponding evolution of his jurisprudence. It is law as both a dependent and independent variable, a classic law and society formulation. The judge’s decisions and jurisprudence operate as “constitutive law,” reflecting both the influence of society on law and its influence on society while remaining relatively autonomous from both. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer’s recent exposition of judicial “pragmatism” is congruent with the jurisprudence of Justice Brennan.

The paper has eight parts with questions and answers as sub-parts: (1) the book and Brennan’s career; (2) constitutional law, federalism, separation of powers, judicial review; (3) civil rights, aboriginal people’s rights, racial discrimination, and other rights; (4) impact on other areas of law (e.g., torts, contracts, criminal law); (5) Brennan’s principles of jurisprudence (6) the High Court, its divisions, and politics (7) personal, family, and professional life; (8) conclusion: mutual influence of law and society.

For the full text of these works and additional scholarship from UW Law faculty and staff, visit the  University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series  on SSRN. A free email subscription is available at the top right of the page.