Aaron Spevack, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School Talfīq--the juristic practice of combining differing legal opinions to resolve a new issue and thereby produce an unprecedented ruling--is often framed as an impious and capricious endeavor aimed at cutting corners. However, jurists have used this practice in ways that have had tremendous social impact, both …

Nahed Samour, Early Career Fellow, Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study The talk focuses on the judge's authority as it emanated from the judicial organization under the early Abbasids. It discusses the concept of office as well as theories of professionalization and bureaucratization and their applicability to the Islamic history of adjudication. Dr. Nahed Samour …

Amir Toft's talk profiles the education and career of a judge who served for one year around 1580 as judge in the court of Üsküdar, one of the districts of Istanbul. His name and titles—Mevlana Ibrahim Çelebi Efendi el-Galatavi—are known to us only through their appearance in the court register for that year. Apart from …

Early Islamic political theory as it enjoyed currency among the scholarly classes alternated between two possibilities: legal functionalism and political anthropology.  Critical to our understanding of these intellectual trends and their conceptual contours is an understanding of a "theoretical turn" in early Islamic thought which created the preconditions for a theory of power, and the …