Law Commons^™

Grounding Non-Muslim Ijtihâd, Matt Halling

Matt Halling

In Islamic law, ijtihâd, or independent legal reasoning, has been limited to Muslims only in classical scholarship. Prohibition of non-Muslim ijtihâd, either express or implied, constricts the potential to harmonize Islamic law with other legal systems and even raises human rights concerns. Using Islamic law scholarship and international treaties, this paper makes the case for permitting non-Muslim ijtihâd.

This paper consists of three parts. Part I looks into the origins and qualifications for ijtihâd, Part II identifies the relevant international and regional human rights provisions supporting non-Muslim Islamic law scholarship, and Part III responds to leading arguments against non-Muslim interpretation …

Clitoridectomy And The Economics Of Islamic Marriage & Divorce Law, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

The Theocratic Challenge To Constitution Drafting In Post-Conflict States, Ran Hirschl

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

You Say You Want A Revolution: Interpretive Communities And The Origins Of Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Haider Ala Hamoudi

Despite its currently conservative character, the modern practice of Islamic finance lies on a bedrock of social, cultural and economic revolution. Examination of these revolutionary origins and their attendant jurisprudential implications reveal much about the schizophrenia plaguing Islamic finance today, of a largely formalist practice repeating the functional aims of the early revolutionaries and falsely understood by substantial portions of the wider Muslim community to be achieving such aims. Though the revolution has not come to pass, some of the comparatively radical functional approaches conceived in the context of the anticipated upheaval, and in particular those of the Iraqi Shi'i …

Baghdad Booksellers, Basra Carpet Merchants, And The Law Of God And Man: Legal Pluralism And The Contemporary Muslim Experience, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

There is a crisis in our law schools in the study of Islamic law and the law of the Muslim polities. The current approaches either focus exclusively on national codes to the derogation of other vitally important influences on the legal order, most importantly the body of norms and rules derived from Islamic foundational texts known as the shari'a, or they regard as secondary, and at times irrelevant, the actual legal order of the societies in favor of an academic construction of the theories of medieval Muslim jurists. Neither of these approaches reflects with a necessary degree of accuracy the …

Lifting The Veil: Women And Islamic Law, Christie S. Warren

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Muezzin's Call And The Dow Jones Bell: On The Necessity Of Realism In The Study Of Islamic Law, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

The central flaw in the current approach to shari'a in the American legal academy is the reliance on the false assumption that contemporary Islamic rules are derived from classical doctrine. This has led both admirers and detractors of the manner in which shari'a is studied to focus their energies on obsolete medieval rules that bear no relationship to the manner in which modern Muslims approach shari'a. The reality is that given the structural pluralism of the rules of the classical era, there is no sensible way that modern rules could be derived from classical doctrine, either in letter or in …

Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court: Managing Constitutional Conflict In An Authoritarian, Aspirationally Islamic State, Clark B. Lombardi

Articles

No abstract provided.