Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts.

• Author: Chenganakkattil, Muhamed Riyaz

Edited by Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale

Harvard University Press, 2017, 241 pages, $45.00, ISBN: 9780674984219

Produced in honor of Roy Mottahedeh, a renowned scholar of the intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East, this volume, Leadership and Justice, edited by Instisar A. Rab and Abigail Balbale, brings together new questions and approaches related to the legal landscape in early Islamic history. Drawing upon the divergent sources and research areas, it sets the ground for an interdisciplinary legal approach to understanding how legal procedures function in the early Islamic courts and who the various stakeholders and actors are within them. Focusing on three different contexts in the historical trajectory of Islamic law, it deals with the judicial procedure, the concept of justice, and people and practices. All set within the specific legal contexts, the volume discusses the defining moments in the founding period of Islamic law, then proceeds to explore the "cosmopolitan" contexts of judicial practices set in the early Muslim empires, and finally, delves into an extensive analysis of the "parallel" legal actors in the Islamic West. The volume dwells on the wide array of possibilities in the history--social and political--of judicial procedures in Islam. With separate introductions for each of the three sections, the volume consists of nine fascinating chapters that engage with the distinct problems in Islamic legal history.

Emphasizing theory and practice, the first section of the volume examines various fundamental and legal questions concerning witnesses, evidence, and the political underpinning of judicial procedures, along with the evolution of different debates in the legal discourse in terms of the development of law in Islam. With a focus on the issues of witnesses, Ahmed el-Shamsy provides a "tentative sketch of changes" regarding testimony, its acceptability, and related concerns to legal witnesses "in the aspect of judicial practice over that century" (p. 3). Concerning the distinct characteristics of witness criteria for Muslims and non-Muslims, el-Shamsy's intervention is in understanding the exclusion and admissibility of the witness in the judicial procedures of the court in the eighth century. To arrive at this problem, el-Shamsy uses many sources and scholarly engagements in both the prophetic and post-prophetic periods to analyze various conflicting interpretations of the exclusion of witnesses.

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