Islamic Law at MESA 2025
We invited a group of attendees from the most recent Middle Eastern Studies Association’s 2025 Annual Meeting (MESA 2025) to report back on their panels related to Islamic law, and to reflect on the state of the field, as seen at MESA. Here is what they had to say. [For reports on the Digital Humanities at MESA 2025, see here.]
Learning and Knowledge Transmission in Morocco
By: Rosemary Admiral (University of Texas at Dallas)
Although we are all scholars of Islamic law, our panel on “Learning and Knowledge Transmission in Morocco” was not about Islamic law specifically. And yet, law was everywhere in the presentations, and taken as a whole, the panel ended up making an argument about the nature of law in pre-colonial versus post-colonial Morocco, particularly with respect to the way law was embedded in society and scholarship before independence. Our presentations followed a rough chronological order woven together by a number of threads, which included attention to legal scholars’ lives and educations and the ways they put their knowledge into action.
Andrea Lee Castonguay’s (Western New England University) paper, “In This Knowledge Economy? The Appearance and Locations of Moroccan Juridical Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean,” investigated the geographical spread of centers of learning in medieval Morocco through biographical texts of Mālikī scholars. Her analysis of the data showed distinct patterns in the expansion of the Mālikī school that contradict common historical narratives, allowing her, for example, to recognize Sabta (today’s Spanish territory of Ceuta) as an earlier center of learning than Fez.
Jocelyn Hendrickson’s (University of Alberta) “Al-Tazi’s Fifteenth-Century Call to Jihad” analyzed a text advocating resistance to Portuguese incursions along the Moroccan coast. Hendrickson showed how Ibn Yaggabsh al-Tāzī’s (d. ca. 920/1514) text, through a combination of both poetry and prose, called on people not only to join the resistance as fighters, but also to essentially “crowd-fund” the jihād.
My own presentation, “The Study of Moroccan Women’s Biography through Muhammad al-Kannuni’s Shahirat al-Maghrib,” is an initial report on a manuscript from the early twentieth century that documents the life of women throughout Moroccan history. This is part of a joint project with Abd al-Latif al-Jilani (Muhammadiyah League of Scholars) to produce a critical Arabic edition and English translation of the manuscript. Al-Kannūnī’s (d. 1938) manuscript bridges earlier genres of biographical dictionaries with modern discourse on the role of women in Moroccan society, constructing a text that draws attention to women’s historical participation in areas such as scholarship and diplomacy.
Armaan Siddiqi (Harvard University) presented on a scholar from the same period as al-Kannūnī, with a similar educational background. In “Transmitting Devotion: The Mawlid as a Medium of Knowledge and Piety in Morocco,” she showed how Muḥammad b. Jaʿfar al-Kattānī (d. 1927) wrote his text for both devotional and pedagogical purposes, using poetry in a way similar to al-Tāzī to facilitate oral transmission, while responding to the challenges of his time on the eve of French colonialism and amidst currents of reform and revival. Both Siddiqi and I highlighted scholars at the conclusion of a system in which religious sciences—including Islamic law—made up the foundation of the educational system, after which scholars could go on to study and write widely on topics in other disciplines.
The final paper documented the new reality of the post-colonial Moroccan education system, where schools model a French system and Islamic law is compartmentalized into pockets of higher education. Ghizlane Bentaouzer’s (Muhammadiyah League of Scholars) “The Place of Religious Education in Moroccan Higher Education” cataloged the degrees and programs in Moroccan universities that focus on Islam and Islamic law. She argued that while modern Moroccan higher education places a high value on science, technology, and other disciplines taught in French, the retention of Islamic studies—including Islamic law at universities in Fez and Agadir, for example—demonstrates the importance the government places on maintaining a connection to Islamic heritage as a central component of modern Moroccan identity.
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The presentations highlighted a number of features of law and scholarship in pre-colonial and post-colonial Morocco. First, Islamic law was foundational to any form of education in pre-colonial Morocco, and while legal scholars such as al-Kannūnī and al-Kittānī wrote works of law, they might also write in areas such as religious sciences, history, biography, or poetry. Second, law was embedded in many areas of life, society, and education, as the poetic forms of both al-Tāzī’s call to jihād and al-Kittānī’s devotional literature demonstrate. Third, legal knowledge was diffuse and dynamic, particularly outside of formal institutions, and Castonguay’s paper showed how these networks expanded and shifted over time. Fourth, even well into what we consider “modern” Moroccan history, knowledge transmission continued as it had in centuries past, albeit with adaptations to meet contemporary concerns.
Although historically, some education had fallen under government supervision, such as the madrasa system beginning in the Marinid period, there remained parallel structures of independent teaching and learning. The transformations that came with colonialism and the independent nation state resulted in the extraction of Islamic law from society, separating it out into distinct segments of the legal system (for example, in the Mudawwana, the adaptation of Mālikī law into a European-style personal status code) or the education system (as distinct degrees in higher education), in all cases under government control. These reorganizations transformed law from a fundamental part of life and scholarship into an advanced degree in a mostly secular educational system.
Beyond Modern Categories: Rethinking Theory in Medieval Islamic Studies
By: Mohammad Sadegh Ansari (SUNY Geneseo)
This panel convened to challenge the conceptual scaffolding that underpins much historical scholarship. Its starting point was a critique of the empiricist habits inherited from the eighteenth century—habits that have left the discipline wary of theory and reliant on categories forged in European modernity. Concepts such as “state,” “taxation,” and “subjectivity,” while central to historical analysis, were never neutral; they emerged from specific modern contexts. The panel asked what happens when these categories are applied to the medieval Islamic world and what alternative frameworks might illuminate its textures.
Grace Bickers’ (Columbia University) paper, “Testimony and Truth-Making in Early Hanafī Fiqh,” addressed this question through the lens of Islamic legal procedure. Rather than accepting modern liberal assumptions that link testimony and evidence to fixed notions of personhood, Bickers urged a reading that decouples these concepts from their presumed universality. Drawing on Talal Asad’s critique of the modern/nonmodern divide, she explored early Hanafi texts—al-Jaṣṣāṣ’s (d. 370/981) Adab al-Qāḍī and al-Sarakhsī’s (d. 483/1090) Mabsūṭ—to ask how truth was constructed in the courtroom. Her analysis shifted focus from rigid categories like gender or communal status to the relational roles of judge, witness, and litigant within the shared project of dispute resolution. Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of narrative selfhood, Bickers proposed that testimony operated less as a “blame machine” and more as a mode of accountability, reframing law as a practice of truth-making rather than punishment.
Aseel Najib’s (Dartmouth College) contribution, “Taxation and Conquest in Early Islamic Law,” pursued a similar theoretical intervention in a different domain. Najib examined second-/eighth-century works on kharāj, including Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798) and Yaḥyā b. Ādam’s (d. 203/818) treatises, which modern scholarship often treats as taxation manuals. Yet, as Najib argued, “taxation” is a concept saturated with modern assumptions about bureaucratic states and fiscal systems. Reading these texts on their own terms revealed them as repositories of debates over governance and resource extraction in the aftermath of the Muslim conquests. Najib’s close analysis of their structure and logic uncovered alternative meanings of kharāj—meanings that resist translation into modern fiscal categories and instead speak to the post-conquest background of early Islamic society.
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Together, these papers exemplified the panel’s call for theoretical rigor in medieval Islamic studies. By interrogating the categories through which scholarship has long approached law and governance, they demonstrated both the risks of uncritical transposition and the possibilities opened by critical theory. The discussion underscored that rethinking modern categories is not an exercise in replacing one set of universals with another but a commitment to historical specificity—a commitment that, as this panel showed, can transform how we understand the past.
Madhhabs, Civil Law, Constitutions, and Law Enforcement Between State and Religious Authority
By: Samir Saad (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law)
This panel was composed of six individually submitted papers, which the MESA Program Committee placed together. An omnium gatherum of topics and scholars, it offered an assemblage of variegated themes: it contemplated the institutionalization of policemen as well as the Potemkin election promises of political leaders in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran; it broached the multivalent approach of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) towards sharīʿa, fiqh, and the sharīʿa courts during the 1950s and 1960s; it considered the functionality of the 1964 constitutions of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt as instruments of social engineering; it examined the ways in which the politics of the Arab Cold War (1952–1970) aggravated the ideological inconsistencies in Egyptian jurist Abd-el-Razzak el Sanhoury’s (d. 1971) legislative vision,[1] discoloring his civil codes and eliciting their controversial rejection in Jordan; and it traversed the horn of Africa to reflect on the role of texts of Islamic jurisprudence in twentieth-century Somalia.
At first, panel members communicated a sense of befuddlement among themselves at the serrying of the motley intellectual worlds that their subjects inhabited. Seen in the round, though, the strands of these subjects can be drawn together at the nodal point onto which they converged: the politics of modern reform in the twentieth-century Arab and Islamic world. These papers sought to capture and understand the origins, functions, effectiveness, and direction of modernizing reforms, often measuring them against the Islamic texts, legal sources, institutions, or societies that such projects sought to consolidate, repackage, or change.
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With rare exceptions, reform projects and their framers have a turbulent past in the twentieth-century Arab and Muslim world. However radical in its intentions and aspirations, the will of the framer and the reform-oriented politician brushed against the tentacles of political cultures steeped in the Arab Islamic past but also beset by the canker of colonialism and the pressures of local and regional claims to supremacy. These framers did not have, to borrow the Hegelian phrase, the “absolute freedom” that the Jacobins did in negating mediated particularities and estates.
As a result, the reform project, or the legal text, became an opportunity for the ruler as well as the political and religious clerisy to consolidate authority, a legislation manqué. The papers of Kamran S. Aghaie (University of Texas at Austin), Relli Shechter (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), Ibrahim Gemeah (Indiana University Bloomington), and Yoshiaki Tokunaga (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) along with my own reminded us that projects of reform in the twentieth-century Middle East, whether they originated with or had been co-opted by authoritarian politicians, were centralizing means that pandered to particular established orders and their political culture. It was not uncommon for such politicians to contort, undermine, and stunt the same reforms that they co-opted and sponsored.
At times, this discordant domination of the reform process was in response to Muslim scholars’ or foreign technocrats’ insistence on a more faithful implementation and application of a particular vision that ran athwart to the ruler’s own. Mohamud Mohamed’s (University of Pennsylvania) concluding presentation was a helpful reminder that the will to ossify a certain kind of interpretation of a text, legislative or otherwise, was not confined to the level of the state or its political rulers; religious sects, too, were out for themselves. They fastened upon interpretive frameworks of texts of Islamic jurisprudence, such as that of Abū Zakariyyā al-Nawawī’s (d. 676/1277) Minhāj al-Ṭālibīn, that best enabled them to benefit their own interests.
Notes:
[1] Transliterated as ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī. However, I adopt the Latin spelling “Abd-el-Razzak el Sanhoury,” which Sanhoury used when he published in French. See, for example, Abd-el-Razzak el Sanhoury, “Le Droit Musulman Comme Element de refonte du Code Civil Egyptien,” in Introduction a l’Étude du droit compare: Recueil d’Études en l’honneur d’Edouard Lambert (Receuil Sirey, 1938), 2:621–42.
