This chapter explores an 1886 judicial decision by Justice Syed Mahmood (d. 1321/1903)—the son of the famous Indian Muslim reformist and educator Sir Syed Ahmed Khan—on a case involving the restitution of conjugal rights, namely, the ability of a husband to sue his wife in court for unlawfully abandoning the martial home. This decision is important for the ways it reflects the operation of Islamic law in a context of British domination, in which premodern Islamic legal norms are read through the lense of the British Common Law tradition, and in which the apparatus and ecosystem of Islamic law have been transformed almost beyond recognition by the emergence of the modern state.

This chapter explores a 1912 legal opinion (fatwā) by the Iranian Twelver Shīʿī jurist Muḥammad Ḥusayn Fishārakī (d. 1353/1935) on a dispute over the ownership of two villages, Jayshī and Saryān, both of which were endowed and had been illegally sold by a trustee in order to escape his various financial troubles. The fatwā upholds the legitimacy of the endowments (sing. waqf) and finds that their sale had been unlawful. The source sheds light on how Islamic law in modern and early modern Iran often operated outside the context of state institutions.

This chapter explores the 2012 legal opinion (fatwā) issued by the Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʾ—the body officially tasked with providing Islamic legal advice by the Egyptian state—on women’s capacity to serve as heads of state. In the course of discussing the issue, the authors apologetically asserts that there is not and has never been a ‘woman question’ in Islam, i.e. that there has never been any restriction on women’s agency ‘in Islam’ per se and that women are not in the least bit excluded from acting in the public sphere. The authors present examples of Muslim women serving as heads of state, judges and in other executive and public order roles, as well as minority legal opinions, in order to demonstrate their contention.

This introduction to Section 5 of the volume on judicial manuals and handbooks discusses the portrayal of Islamic legal judgeship (qaḍāʾ) in existing scholarship and comments on the transformation of the institution in the modern period with the rise of the nation-state and the tendency toward the codification of law, as well as including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

This chapter explores the Saudi judge and legal scholar Ibn Khunyan’s (b. 1376/1956) al-Kāshif fī Sharḥ Niẓām al-Murāfaʿāt al-Sharʿiyya al-Saʿūdī. This work focuses on the Saudi Code of Sharīʿa Procedure and follows the format of a European-style legal commentary, commenting on all 276 articles of the Code with reference to Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). The section excerpted here discusses the first article of the Code of Sharīʿa Procedure (niẓām al-murāfaʿāt al-sharʿiyya), which stipulates the sources of the law applicable in Saudi courts. In addition to his explanation, Ibn Khunayn uses the commentary on the first article of the code as an opportunity to give an overview over the workings of the Saudi judiciary.

This introduction to Section 4 of the volume on court judgements and related works discusses the nature of recent research on the subject and comments on the increased availability of primary sources (in the form of sijillāt) from the Ottoman period onwards, including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

This chapter concerns the preface to an 1844 (Ottoman) Turkish translation of al-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya by Kemalüddin İbrahim b. Bahşi b. Dede Cöngi (d. 975/1567). The translator, Meşrebzâde Mehmed Ârif Efendi (d. 1274/1858), examines the use and application of the technical Arabic term siyāsa in its Muslim legal and political contexts. The translated work reflects the need to legitimate sultanic intervention in law in the wake of the addition of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to the Ottoman Empire in 1517; it aims to conceptualise Ottoman criminal law in religio-legal terms, in an attempt to bolster the religious credibility of the Ottoman state. Its translation in the 19th century reflects changes in administration that led to the redefinition of the broad powers and discretionary (taʿzīr) authority given to administrators in the field of politics, as well as the mission descriptions of governors and judges.