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For the Islamic communities, the Quran is not the only sacred text or object, but most religious texts is sacred and valuable for their comparative connectivity with the text and contents of the Holy Book. The phenomenological discourses on Islamic textuality are very much centered on Sufism. The legal texts have hardly been acknowledged as part of religious signs, symbols or rituals, whereas those are considered the most important for the majority of Muslims in the Indian Ocean littoral who identify themselves as Sunnī and Shāfiʿī Muslims. The texts of the Shāfiʿī school have played a crucial role in disseminating and sustaining ideas and notions of Islam in the littoral from the age of the manuscripts until the present age of print and new media. As sources of this knowledge and their faith systems, those texts have found significant places in their religious imaginations and performances with varying meanings and functions as objects of sacralization, conservation, and commodification. This article analyses multiple forms of intentionality and temporal and spatial awareness in the making and keeping of these legal texts as valued and venerated objects.
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By the late nineteenth century, when printing press was popular across the world. In South Asia, there was increased production and dissemination of Tamil and Malayalam vernacular materials in Arabic script. This intermarriage of local languages with a cosmopolitan script was part of a larger trend of the time, and in South India those were advanced by Arabic-Malayalam and Arabic-Tamil literatures (also referred as Malabari and Arwī respectively). Hundreds of texts printed annually at the prime centres of Islamic printing on both Malabar and Coromandel coasts were circulated among mobile and immobile communities of the region across the Indian Ocean, Pacific and Atlantic littorals. The reach and impact of such vernacular printings are yet to be explored thoroughly, for these materials have been spread across several formal and informal collections and there has not been any systematic attempt to identify or catalogue them. In this article, I focus on uncatalogued Arabic-Malayalam materials at the British Library London on which I have been working on in the last few years. These materials from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries help us understand the history of the region, religion and printing. After a brief historical overview, I focus on some major features, themes, trends, places, and people in about 150 texts I consulted, and which I discuss in relation to broader histories of Arabic-Malayalam tradition.
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This article examines the Bengal–China connections between the Ilyās Shāhī and Ming dynasties in the early fifteenth century across the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea. It traces how law played a central role in the cultural geography and diplomatic vocabulary between individuals and communities in foreign lands, with their shared understanding of two nodal points of law. Diplomatic missions explicate how customary, regional and transregional laws were entangled in inter-imperial etiquette. Then there were the religious orders of Islam that constituted an inner circle of imperial exchanges. Between the Ilyās Shāhī rule in Bengal and the Ming Empire in China, certain dimensions of Islamic law provided a common language for the circulation of people and ideas. Stretching between cities and across oceans the interpolity legal exchanges expose interesting aspects of the histories of China and Bengal.
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Ponnāni was a port in southwestern India that resisted the Portuguese incursions in the sixteenth century through the active involvement of religious, mercantile and military elites. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Ponnāni was the only place where the Dutch East India Company had commercial access into the kingdom of the Zamorins of Calicut. When the Dutch gained prominence in the coastal belt, this port town became the main centre for their commercial, diplomatic, and political transactions. But as a religious centre it began to recede into oblivion in the larger Indian Ocean and Islamic scholarly networks. The present article examines this dual process and suggests important reasons for the transformations. It argues that the port town became crucial for diplomatic and economic interests of the Dutch East India Company and the Zamorins, whereas its Muslim population became more parochial as they engaged with themselves than with the larger socio-political and scholarly networks.
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It is clear that the Lutheran Reformation greatly contributed to changes in theological and legal ideas – but what was the extent of its impact on the field of contract law? Legal historians have extensively studied the contract doctrines developed by Roman Catholic theologians and canonists; however, they have largely neglected Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Johann Aepinus, Martin Chemnitz, Friedrich Balduin and many other reformers. This book focuses on those neglected voices of the Reformation, exploring their role in the history of contract law. These men mapped out general principles to counter commercial fraud and dictated norms to regulate standard economic transactions. The most learned jurists, such as Matthias Coler, Peter Heige, Benedict Carpzov, and Samuel Stryk, among others, studied these theological teachings and implemented them in legal tenets. Theologians and jurists thus cooperated in resolving contract law problems, especially those concerning interest and usury.
Author:
It is clear that the Lutheran Reformation greatly contributed to changes in theological and legal ideas – but what was the extent of its impact on the field of contract law? Legal historians have extensively studied the contract doctrines developed by Roman Catholic theologians and canonists; however, they have largely neglected Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Johann Aepinus, Martin Chemnitz, Friedrich Balduin and many other reformers. This book focuses on those neglected voices of the Reformation, exploring their role in the history of contract law. These men mapped out general principles to counter commercial fraud and dictated norms to regulate standard economic transactions. The most learned jurists, such as Matthias Coler, Peter Heige, Benedict Carpzov, and Samuel Stryk, among others, studied these theological teachings and implemented them in legal tenets. Theologians and jurists thus cooperated in resolving contract law problems, especially those concerning interest and usury.