Why Another Bibliography of Islamic Law?

Studies on Islamic law and its various sub-fields have grown exponentially since the early eighties of the last century. Even the specialist will hardly be able to keep track of, let alone read, the large number of titles that are being published all over the world. While this assessment applies to Islamic law in general, it is also correct with regard to the sub-field of Islamic criminal law. There are a number of important reasons for this surge in scholarship over the past forty years. In particular, the interest in Islamic criminal law has grown with the number of countries legislating it, Brunei being just the latest example. This process has not stopped since Colonel Gaddafi spearheaded it in 1972, and there is little reason to believe that it will not continue in the future. Further, a large body of research has been produced in countries where some form of Islamic criminal law has been enacted, e.g. in Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia. Many new journals, often founded by Sharīʿa faculties in these countries, produce new scholarship in English as well as in other languages. New open access journals and the possibilities the internet offers in general facilitate the publication of books and articles and thus contribute to a wealth of new publications. Scientific, legal, political and other challenges also contribute to the steady growth of the field. Scholars now deal with the challenges of bioethics, suicide terrorism, cybercrime, forensic psychology, money laundering and more. Finally, a large number of NGOs and INGOs deal with human rights violations in Muslim majority countries that often are in connection with aspects of codified Islamic criminal law. They publish well-researched and extensive reports on their websites. All of these trends make up for a plethora of books and scholarly articles on the subject at hand. Indeed, the number of publications on Islamic criminal law and matters related to it are more than the individual scholar and researcher is able to oversee. This finding in itself would justify the publication of this bibliography.

But does a printed bibliography still make sense in a time of extremely rapid search machines that deliver tens or hundreds of thousands of results in milliseconds? Is it not easily possible to find all these entries with a quick google search? I still remember how I spent weeks and months in the 1980s and early 1990s sifting through the traditional card index boxes at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, filling in order forms and waiting for the books and articles to be ready for consultation. The world has changed since then. The internet has made any search for literature a lot faster and ostensibly much simpler. In addition, the searching can be done from home, and the results, i.e. the books and articles one finds, thanks to digitalisation, can often be consulted or read on your computer at home as well. However, the mere wealth of information has also become unmanageable. It needs to be structured and sorted. This is what this bibliography attempts to do. It maps an important sub-field of Islamic law, divides its different aspects into chapters that are easily searchable and thus not only renders it easily accessible to the researcher and student but also documents and charts the developments within Islamic criminal law during the past decades. It should be noted that this is the first Islamic criminal law bibliography of this size ever published. With more than 3,600 entries its size also surpasses all other bibliographies on Islamic law in general. This bibliography thus gives enhanced visibility to a field that is of eminent scholarly but also political importance. It will be of interest to those researching Islamic law in general, to students and researchers of Islamic criminal law in Muslim majority countries in particular, but also to researchers and activists dealing with human rights in the Muslim world.

What This Bibliography Covers

A Bibliography of Islamic Criminal Law covers all books and articles I could find on the subject, with no particular time limitation, starting with the 19th century to the most recent publications. It does not include book reviews and short encyclopaedia entries. However, if an encyclopaedia entry is longer and is closer to a short introduction to a given key theme I have included it. In many bibliographies Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses are not taken into account despite their often important scholarly contribution. I have therefore tried to find and include as many pertinent Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses as I could find. A certain number of them can be downloaded for free with the help of the bibliographical details provided here. At an early stage of the work I decided to refrain from adding annotations to entries because the rapidly rising number of titles I was able to compile simply did not allow for it. The choice of languages included is as simple as it is unsatisfactory. I have included all the European languages I can read well plus a few titles in languages I read less well but where the subject was clear and fitting. The compromises I had to make are obvious. A number of relevant languages are missing, especially those from countries with Muslim majorities, such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Indonesian and others, as well as, e.g., all the Slavic languages. I decided to exclude these languages because either I don’t read them or when I do (Arabic, Persian), including them would have made my (and the publisher’s) task complicated and time-consuming to a degree that would have made the whole project unfeasible. An argument in my defence is that all bibliographies on Islamic law I am aware of have made that same choice for probably the same reasons.¹

I have also not included URLs because they are not only often very long and cumbersome to type, but are also ephemeral and become outdated and unusable rather quickly. Further, with the high-powered browsers available, it is faster and easier to copy or type the title of a book or the name of an author into a search machine. At this point it deserves to be mentioned that a certain number of the listed titles can be found on the internet for free. In the past 20 years open access journals of varying quality have multiplied. Many publish high-quality peer-reviewed articles. Others are of more dubious quality and are often the product of the thriving activities of rogue publishers who not only lack peer review but often publish almost without or with only rudimentary quality checks. It goes without saying that articles from such sources have not been accepted into this bibliography, except in justified cases.

Structure and Use of This Bibliography

The structure of this bibliography and the way it should be used are rather straightforward and follow to a large degree the Al-Zwaini/Peters bibliography of Islamic law of 1994. Most important, the bibliographical entries are consecutively numbered. There are two main parts. Part one covers entries listed by themes in alphabetical order from “abortion” to “zinā”, with an introductory general part preceding them. All entries that can be connected to a given country, region, era or organisation are to be found in part two. If the title of an article or a book contains several keywords, those indicating a country or an era receive preference and are thus listed in part two, otherwise they can be found in part one. Both parts cover, on the one hand, the main issues of Islamic criminal law (ḥudūd, qiṣāṣ, taʿzīr …), and on the other hand they reflect the wide range of titles I found when compiling this bibliography. They were at times new and unexpected, but are evidence of the rapid development of the field. The unsuspecting reader may be surprised to find chapter titles such as “Germany” and “United States of America”; however, existing scholarly articles linking these countries to Islamic criminal law justify separate chapters. The formatting of the entries follows the Index Islamicus and its protocol.

The Arabic article Al-, al- El-, el-, An- etc., in author names is disregarded in its hyphenated form. Thus “An-Naʿim” is listed under N, El-Baradie under B and so forth. Names beginning with an unhyphenated Al, El etc., e.g. Alkali, Eltantawi will be listed under A and E.

The second set of tools to orientate the user of this bibliography are the Index of Authors and the Index of Subjects and People. It goes without saying that many of the bibliographical entries cover much more than what the titles betray. I have, therefore, as far as possible checked the texts at hand as to the subject matters they contain and listed them accordingly. Thus, while the table of contents gives a solid first orientation to the user of this bibliography, the two indices unlock the richness of the material covered.

Olaf Köndgen

Strasbourg