Rudolph Peters' book, first published in 2006, is about crimes and their punishments as laid down in Islamic law. In recent years some of the more fundamentalist regimes, such as those of Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and the northern states of Nigeria have reintroduced Islamic law in place of western criminal codes. Peters gives a detailed account of the classical doctrine and traces the enforcement of criminal law from the Ottoman period to the present day. The accounts of actual cases which range from theft, banditry, murder, fornication and apostasy shed light on the complexities of the law, and the sensitivity and perspicacity of the qadis who implemented it. This is the first single-authored account of both the theory and practice of Islamic criminal law. It will be invaluable for students, and scholars in the field, as well as for professionals looking for comprehensive coverage of the topic.
Islamic reformism as it came into existence by the end of the 19th century was a response to the challenge of the increasing Western impact in the Islamic world. The way this reformism expressed itself was, however, to a large extent conditioned by tradition. All kinds of issues that became particularly associated with it had already been part and parcel of the Islamic heritage and subject of fierce debates. One of these issues-a crucial one in present-day reformism-is the idjtihad versus taqlid discussion.' 1 Reformers claimed the right to interpret the Koran and the Sunnah independently from the prevailing opinions of the lawyers of the four madhhabs. Their claims were opposed by the followers of these madhhabs, who held that since long nobody was qualified anymore to interpret the sources on his own, and that all Moslems were nowadays bound to abide by the decisions of the scholars of the madhhabs. This discussion is not a novel one. Throughout Islamic history there have been scholars to attack the prevailing notion that taqlid is obligatory. In general they belonged to the fundamentalist tradition in Islam. This is no coincidence as the concept of idjtihdd is structurally related to fundamentalism. John Voll has applied the term fundamentalism to such tendencies in Islamic thought as stress the trans-* Paper read at the 10th Congres de l'Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants (Edinburgh, September 1980). ' This discussion is still going on. For a recent example, cJ: S.
Until now, the first criminal legislation promulgated by Mehmed Alī has been available only in an unreliable Arabic summary. In this essay, I edit and translate the original Ottoman Turkish text, as found in the Egyptian National Archive. The edition and translation are preceded by an analysis of the code in which I argue (1) that this code is best regarded as an expression of Mehmed Alī's attempt to centralize and rationalize the governmental apparatus and the administration of justice, in order to tighten his control over Egypt; and (2) that the document can be read as an articulation of the perceived social distance between the Turkish-speaking ruling class and other groups in Egyptian society.
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