You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book explores the relationship between custom and Islamic law and seeks to uncover the role of custom in the construction of legal rulings. On a deeper level, however, it deals with the perennial problem of change and continuity in the Islamic legal tradition (or any tradition for that matter).
This encyclopedic work on Islam comprises English translations of all canonical ḥadīths, complete with their respective chains of transmission (isnāds). By conflating the variant versions of the same ḥadīth, the repetitiveness of its literature has been kept wherever possible to a minimum. The latest methods of isnād analysis, described in the general introduction, have been employed in an attempt to identify the person(s) responsible for each ḥadīth. The book is organized in the alphabetical order of those persons. These are the so-called ‘common links’. Each of them is listed with the tradition(s) for the wording of which he can be held accountable, or with which he can at l...
High rates of divorce, often taken to be a modern and western phenomenon, were also typical of medieval Islamic societies. By pitting these high rates of divorce against the Islamic ideal of marriage,Yossef Rapoport radically challenges usual assumptions about the legal inferiority of Muslim women and their economic dependence on men. He argues that marriages in late medieval Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem had little in common with the patriarchal models advocated by jurists and moralists. The transmission of dowries, women's access to waged labour, and the strict separation of property between spouses made divorce easy and normative, initiated by wives as often as by their husbands. This carefully researched work of social history is interwoven with intimate accounts of individual medieval lives, making for a truly compelling read. It will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines concerned with the history of women and gender in Islam.
Nineteenth-century philologist and Biblical critic William Robertson Smith famously concluded that the sacred status of holy places derives not from their intrinsic nature but from their social character. Building upon this insight, Mecca and Eden uses Islamic exegetical and legal texts to analyze the rituals and objects associated with the sanctuary at Mecca. Integrating Islamic examples into the comparative study of religion, Brannon Wheeler shows how the treatment of rituals, relics, and territory is related to the more general mythological depiction of the origins of Islamic civilization. Along the way, Wheeler considers the contrast between Mecca and Eden in Muslim rituals, the dispersal and collection of relics of the prophet Muhammad, their relationship to the sanctuary at Mecca, and long tombs associated with the gigantic size of certain prophets mentioned in the Quran. Mecca and Eden succeeds, as few books have done, in making Islamic sources available to the broader study of religion.
This study examines how religious authority was distributed in early Islam. It argues the case that, as in Shi'ism, it was concentrated in the head of state, rather than dispersed among learned laymen as in Sunnism. Originally the caliph was both head of state and ultimate source of religious law; the Sunni pattern represents the outcome of a conflict between the caliph and early scholars who, as spokesmen of the community, assumed religious leadership for themselves. Many Islamicists have assumed the Shi'ite concept of the imamate to be a deviant development. In contrast, this book argues that it is an archaism preserving the concept of religious authority with which all Muslims began.
This volume contains the papers read at the Leiden Conference on Canonization and Decanonization of 9-10 January 1997. The emphasis in this rich and wide-ranging contribution to the subject is on the processes of canonization and decanonization in several religions and on the phenomenon of religious canons as well. It has two sections: (De)canonization and the History of Religions, and (De)canonization and Modern Society. In the first section processes out of which canons eventually emerge are highlighted in contributions devoted to particular religions, viz. African religions, Judaism and Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. The articles of the second section are of particular relevance to the contemporary situation in the western world, dealing with aspects such as forms of the survival of a canon in processes of modernization, canonization and the challenge of plurality, and canonization and hermeneutics. The reader may benefit even more from this volume as it contains also An Annotated Bibliography on the subject.
Sharon Farmer here investigates the ways in which three medieval communities—the town of Tours, the basilica of Saint-Martin there, and the abbey of Marmoutier nearby—all defined themselves through the cult of Saint Martin. She demonstrates how in the early Middle Ages the bishops of Tours used the cult of Martin, their fourthcentury predecessor, to shape an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town. As the heirs to Martin's see, the bishops projected themselves as the rightful leaders of the community. However, in the late eleventh century, she shows, the canons of Saint-Martin (where the saint's relics resided) and the monks of Marmoutier (which Martin had founded) took control of the ...