Collective Liability In Islam

Provides a close analysis of theʿAqila, a group collectively liable for blood money payments, in Islamic law and history.

Offering the first close study of the ʿAqila, a group collectively liable for blood money payments on behalf of a member who committed an accidental homicide, Nurit Tsafrir analyses the group's transformation from a pre-Islamic custom to an institution of the Shari'a, and its further evolution through medieval and post medieval Islamic law and society. Having been an essential factor in the maintenance of social order within Muslim societies, the ʿAqila is the intersection between legal theory and practice, between Islamic law and religion, and between Islamic law and the state. Tracing the history of the ʿAqila, this study reveals how religious values, state considerations and social organization have participated in shaping and reshaping this central institution, which still concerns contemporary Muslim scholars.

This dissertation studies a unique subset of legal obligations in Islamic law known as "collective duties" (fard kifāya ) and focuses on juristic writing in the premodern period between the 9th and 14th centuries C.E. Together with the more widely recognized "individual obligations" ( fard 'ayn), these duties encompass the complete range of mandated behavior in Islamic law. Individual obligations follow a simple pattern: one person is assigned responsibility for performing a particular act and is solely held responsible if they fail to do so. Collective duties are premised on a different concept involving shared responsibility for required acts. They are based on a formula consisting of two clauses, which loosely draws from a Qur'ānic prooftext. The first clause states that as long as some people perform the duty, then the obligation is suspended for everyone else. While everyone initially carries the burden, they are not all required to perform. However, the second clause adds an important warning: if no one performs the duty, then everyone is held accountable. This study explores the juristic discourse on collective duties in order to better understand how they function, what purpose they serve and why they might have been created. As premodern jurists explored the implications of collective duties as a whole, they developed the theoretical outlines of a kifāya-doctrine, one that asked questions of whether collective duties were preferred to individual obligations, who in the collective was required to perform and when an obligation was suspended. Beyond the general doctrine, the dissertation also examines legal rules developed for three specific collective duties: jihād, funerary rites and duties to rescue. The discourse on these duties demonstrates how jurists not only provided practical guidance for performance of the obligation, but also thought more broadly about the theoretical implications for law. In the process, they began to determine who belongs in the moral community, defined a robust role for the state in law's implementation and speculated on what should constitute ethical behavior. As a result, they made clear that the normative universe of obligation is essential to understanding the Islamic legal tradition.

The Research Handbook on Islamic Law and Society provides an examination of the role of Islamic law as it applies in Muslim and non-Muslim societies through legislation, fatwa, court cases, sermons, media, or scholarly debate. It illuminates the intersection of social, political, economic and cultural factors that inform Islamic Law across a number of jurisdictions. Chapters evaluate when and how actors and institutions have turned to Islamic law to address problems faced by societies in Muslim and, in some cases, Western states.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial} The model of Islamic insurance policy is based on the principles of mutual cooperation, brotherhood and solidarity. This timely volume contradicts the widely-held belief that insurance policies oppose the teachings of Islam, exploring ways in which it coheres with Shari’ah law. The book explores Takaful, an insurance paradigm that is in accordance with Islamic principles and suits the needs of modern Islamic economies and communities.

A short exposition of the value and concept of human rights in Islam as noted in the Quran and Sunnah

This book, first published in 2006, is an account of the theory and practice of Islamic criminal law.

Does Islamic law define Islamic ethics? Or is the law a branch of a broader ethical system? Or is it but one of several independent moral discourses, Islamic and otherwise, competing for Muslims’ allegiance? The essays in this book present a range of answers: some take fiqh as the defining framework for ethics, others insert the law into a broader ethical system, and others present it as just one among several parallel Islamic ethical discourses, or show how Islamic ethics might coexist with non-Muslim normative systems. Their answers have far reaching implications for epistemology, for the authority of jurists and lay Muslims, for the practical moral challenges of daily life, and for relationships with non-Muslims. The book presents Muslim ethicists with a strategic contemporary choice: should they pursue a single overarching methodology for judging all ethical questions, or should they relish the rhetorical and political competition of alternative but not necessarily incompatible moral discourses?

This book is the first ethnographic study of Muslim minorities' practice of Islamic law in contemporary China.

Through revealing the fascinating story of the Sufi master Aghā-yi Buzurg and her path to becoming the 'Great Lady' in sixteenth-century Bukhara, Aziza Shanazarova invites readers into the little-known world of female religious authority in early modern Islamic Central Asia, revealing a far more multifaceted gender history than previously supposed. Pointing towards new ways of mapping female religious authority onto the landscapes of early modern Muslim narratives, this book serves as an intervention into the debate on the history of women and religion that views gender as a historical phenomenon and construct, challenging narratives of the relationship between gender and age in Islamic discourse of the period. Shanazarova draws on previously unknown primary sources to bring attention to a rich world of female religiosity involving communal leadership, competition for spiritual superiority, and negotiation with the political elite that transforms our understanding of women's history in early modern Central Asia.