The legal status of ḏimmī-s in the Islamic West (second/eighth-ninth/fifteenth centuries) (original) (raw)

Fierro & Tolan, The Legal Status of Ḍimmi-s in the Islamic West

Islamic Law and Society, 2016

This volume provides a cutting-edge view of the complexity of the subject of the legal status of dhimmīs and uses a richer collection of sources than previously available. Its focus on the Islamic West and the Mālikī madhhab gives the volume a degree of cohesion. Some of the key arguments put forth (if a multi-authored collection may be said to advance an argument) include the following: (1) that the treatment of dhimmīs is not limited to a specialized field of the law but rather is dispersed across several fields and must therefore be studied in a comprehensive manner; (2) that dhimmī status and the laws regulating it were at first highly variable and evolved substantially over time; (3) that, in important ways, the laws of dhimmīs themselves, meaning the legal traditions cultivated by tributary Jews and Christians living within Muslim polities, were not separate from the dominant legal system, but symbiotically connected, mutually interactive, and integral to the larger system; e.g., Jewish law interacted with and was facilitated by Muslim administration and society; and (4) that the dynamics of dhimmī status cannot be known from a single genre of legal writing or from Islamic legal writings alone, but rather should be studied and analysed using other kinds of texts and documents pertaining to social negotiation and administration (e.g., those produced by muḥtaṣibs or market inspectors and maẓālim courts, i.e., courts of redress presided over by rulers, not qāḍīs).

The legal status of Dhimmī-s in the Islamic West (second/eighth-ninth/fifteenth centuries)

2013

The studies brought together in this volume provide an important contribution to the history of ḏimmī-s in the medieval dār al-islām, and more generally to the legal history of religious minorities in medieval societies. The central question addressed is the legal status accorded to ḏimmī-s (Jews and Christians) in the Muslim law in the medieval Muslim west (the Maghreb and Muslim Spain). The scholars whose work is brought together in these pages have dealt with a rich and complex variety of legal sources. Many of the texts are from the Mālikī legal tradition; they include fiqh, fatwā-s, ḥisba manuals. These texts function as the building blocks of the legal framework in which jurists and rulers of Maghrebi and Peninsular societies worked. The very richness and complexity of these texts, as well as the variety of responses that they solicited, refute the textbook idea of a monolithic ḏimmī system, supposedly based on the Pact of ‘Umar, applied throughout the Muslim world. In fact when one looks closely at the early legal texts or chronicles from both the Mashreq and the Maghreb, there is little evidence for a standard, uniform ḏimmī system, but rather a wide variety of local adaptations. The articles in this volume provide numerous examples of the richness and complexity of interreligious relations in Medieval Islam and the reactions of jurists to those relations.