CENTER FOR LAW AND RELIGION FORUM » Islamic Law

Even people who know little about Islamic law have heard of the fatwa: an opinion, issued by a qualified scholar, or mufti, on a question of Islamic law. In classical thought, a fatwa is not bind...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2023/05/25/a-new-study-of-fatwas-in-islamic-law/

In at least some interpretations of Islamic law, there exists the concept of “mut’a” or “pleasure” marriage, a temporary arrangement the duration of which the parties specify in advance...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2023/04/06/on-temporary-marriage-in-islam/

One of the very earliest recorded encounters between a Christian and a Muslim, a public debate between a Syriac patriarch and an Arab emir shortly after the Arab conquest of Syria, concerns the r...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2022/11/10/christian-and-muslim-approaches-to-law/

Salafism is a movement within Islam that seeks to return to what it understands as the earliest, and therefore purest, expressions of Islamic law and practice, from the time of the first few gene...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2022/09/29/a-new-book-on-salafism/

Several years ago, I wrote an essay on the concept of human dignity in different legal systems, including the Islamic. Most legal systems honor human dignity, but the concept has different meanin...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2022/09/22/a-new-book-on-human-rights-and-islamic-states/

The Ja’fari School represents the principal method of jurisprudence in Shi’a Islam and the official source of Islamic law under the Iranian Constitution. It is comparatively less well known a...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2022/08/25/an-intellectual-history-of-the-jafari-school/

In classical Islamic law, Hudud crimes are those committed against Allah and for which Allah has mandated punishments that man cannot alter. The schools differ on the precise definition, but Hudu...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2019/07/03/kamali-on-hudud-crimes-in-islam/

Rashid Rida was an Islamic reformer, active in the early part of the 20th Century, who advocated reopening the gates of interpretation of Islamic law in order to address issues of modernity–inc...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2019/06/21/rashid-rida-and-islamic-reform/

We start the week with an interesting-looking book from Harvard on how Islamist movements have adopted popular sovereignty–an idea unknown in classical Islam–as a main element of their politi...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2019/05/06/popular-sovereignty-in-islam/

Oxford has released a new collection of essays on Islamic law, The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, edited by Anver Emon (University of Toronto) and Rumee Ahmed (University of British Columbia). ...

https://lawandreligionforum.org/2019/03/01/the-oxford-handbook-of-islamic-law/