In Shariʿa, Justice and Legal Order: Egyptian and Islamic Law: Selected Essays Rudolph Peters discusses in 35 articles practice of both Shariʿa and state law. The principal themes are legal order and the actual application of law both in the judiciaries as well in cultural and political debates. Many of the topics deal with penal law. Although the majority of studies are situated in the Ottoman and, especially, Egyptian period, few of them are of another region or a more recent period, such as in Nigeria or, also, Egypt. The book’s historical studies are mainly based on archival judicial records and are definitively pioneering. Although the selected articles of this book are the fruit of more than forty years of research, most of them have constantly been cited.
Rudolph Peters, Ph.D. (1979), emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam. In the 1980s he has been director of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute of Cairo for five years. He has published on jihad in Islam, Islamic law and especially penal law.
Foreword Robert Gleave
Preface
Section 1: Legal History of Egypt
Part 1: Nineteenth Century
Penal Law: Shariʿa, Legislation, Judiciary
1 Murder on the Nile: Homicide Trials in 19th-Century Egyptian Shariʿa Courts
2 Muhammad al-ʿAbbasi al-Mahdi (d. 1897), Grand Mufti of Egypt, and His al-Fatawa al-Mahdiyya
3 Islamic and Secular Criminal Law in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Role and Function of the Qadi
4 “For His Correction and as a Deterrent Example for Others”: Meḥmed ʿAlī’s First Criminal Legislation (1829–1830)
5 Administrators and Magistrates: The Development of a Secular Judiciary in Egypt, 1842–1871
6 Between Paris, Istanbul, and Cairo: The Origins of Criminal Legislation in Late Ottoman Egypt (1829–58)
7 The Significance of Nineteenth-Century Pre-Colonial Legal Reform in Egypt: The Codification of Criminal and Land Law
Case Studies
8 The Lions of Qasr al-Nil Bridge: The Islamic Prohibition of Images as an Issue in the ʿUrabi Revolt
9 An Administrator’s Nightmare: Feuding Families in Nineteenth-Century Bahariyya Oasis
10 Petitions and Marginal Voices in Nineteenth Century Egypt: The Case of the Fisherman’s Daughter
11 The Infatuated Greek: Social and Legal Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
12 The Violent Schoolmaster: The “Normalisation” of the Dossier of a Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Legal Case
Legal Punishment
13 Prisons and Marginalisation in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
14 Egypt and the Age of the Triumphant Prison: Legal Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
15 Controlled Suffering: Mortality and Living Conditions in 19th-Century Egyptian Prisons
Part 2: Other Egyptian Periods
16 New Sources for the History of the Dakhla Oasis in the Ottoman Period
17 Sharecropping in the Dakhla Oasis: Shariʿa and Customary Law in Ottoman Egypt
18 Body and Spirit of Islamic Law: Madhhab Diversity in Ottoman Documents from the Dakhla Oasis, Egypt
19 The Battered Dervishes of Bab Zuwayla: A Religious Riot in Eighteenth-Century Cairo
20 Divine Law or Man-Made Law? Egypt and the Application of the Shariʿa
Section 2: Islamic Law in General
21 Apostasy in Islam with G.J.J. de Vries
22 Dar al-Harb, Dar al-Islam und der Kolonialismus
23 Idjtihad and Taqlid in 18th- and 19th-Century Islam
24 Islam and the Legitimation of Power: The Mahdi-Revolt in the Sudan
25 Religious Attitudes towards Modernization in the Ottoman Empire: A Nineteenth-Century Pious Text on Steamships, Factories and the Telegraph
26 Islamic Law and Human Rights: A Contribution to an Ongoing Debate
27 Murder in Khaybar: Some Thoughts on the Origins of the Qasāma Procedure in Islamic Law
28 From Jurists’ Law to Statute Law or What Happens When the Shariʿa Is Codified
29 The Reintroduction of Shariʿa Criminal Law in Nigeria: New Challenges for the Muslims of the North
30 The Enforcement of God’s Law: The Shariʿah in the Present World of Islam
31 What Does It Mean to Be an Official Madhhab? Hanafism and the Ottoman Empire
32 The Re-Islamization of Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria and the Judiciary: The Safiyyatu Hussaini Case
33 Shariʿa and ‘Natural Justice’: The Implementation of Islamic Criminal Law in British India and Colonial Nigeria
34 Dutch Extremist Islamism: Van Gogh’s Murderer and His Ideas
35 (In)compatibility of Religion and Human Rights: The Case of Islam Copyright Acknowledgments Index
All interested in Islamic law and Ottoman and Egyptian legal history.