February 18: Shari'a Workshop: Sahih al-Bukhari's Criteria

Thursday, February 18, 2021, 4:00 PM EST

Register for the Zoom webinar here.

In this workshop, Issam Eido and Mohammed T. Safi will discuss their paper entitled “Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī's Criteria: An Epistemological Perspective.” In an innovative study of the Hadith corpus, the early records of statements and actions that, following the Qur’an, represent the second “source” for the Sharia, the authors consider connections between Islamic methods and conceptions and those of contemporary western thought on “testimony." They will be joined by Jonathan Brown, Scott Lucas, and Asma Sayeed.

Download article here.

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January 28: Shari'a Workshop: Between Kazan and Kashghar

Thursday, January 28, 2021, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST

Register for the Zoom webinar here.

In this workshop, Dr Paolo Sartori will discuss his paper entitled, Between Kazan and Kashghar: On the Vernacularization of Islamic Jurisprudence in Central Eurasia. In this article he suggests that what today is known as “entexting” in the Western historiography of Islamic law did not just originate from colonialism. Emphasis on a self-contained number of jurisprudential texts was in fact one of the outcomes of a profound process of transformation in the Islamic legal episteme among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia. One of the forces behind such a transformation can be identified in what Sheldon Pollock has termed “vernacularization” – that is, a shift toward the popularization of a cosmopolitan body of scholarship through the medium of translation into local languages. The act of translation itself reflected the effort to select, domesticate, and naturalize, specific juristic texts, the contents of which were perceived as important, though equally inaccessible. Translation led to distinction and preferment. It also brought about a process of “debasement”, i.e., a movement toward the decontextualization of Islamic jurisprudential writing traditions and their reworking into original works written in the vernacular Turkic, which blended the genre of creeds with jurisprudence.

Download article here.

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