Islamic Law and Society

This paper critically reviews the models of the relationship between literary structures such as narrative and discourse, on the one hand, and social structures such as social networks, on the other. It first critically analyzes the earlier one-sided, non-reciprocal models and continues with a survey of the more recent reciprocal models which are suggested by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Finally, it outlines how these new reciprocal models can shed more light on the interaction between literary and social structures.

Michael Lecker provides us with a monograph exclusively focused on a single legal document from the time of the Prophet. Among both specialists in Islamic studies and the general public, this document is commonly known as the ‘Constitution of Madina’. Yet the creators of the document called it ‘kit:b’— literally, ‘a written document’. The book derives from the author’s Ph.D. thesis submitted in Hebrew to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in 1982.

Until the nineteenth century, at least dozen legal traditions were practised in the Ottoman Empire: five non-Islamic (Jewish, Armenian, Orthodox, Catholic, and Capt) along with four Sunni (Hanafi,Shafi'i, Maliki, and

One of the twentieth century’s most influential Muslims, Malcolm X - El-Hajj