Legal Pluralism among the Court Records of Medieval Egypt (original) (raw)
Were the principles of Islamic law recognized by ḏimmī courts? Were the boundaries between Muslim and ḏimmī courts permeable, or did ḏimmī leaders try to solidify their power over their communities by controlling ḏimmī access to Muslim courts? To what extent did the pressures of litigants' forum-shopping affect the decisions of ḏimmī courts? The Judeo-Arabic documents of the Cairo Geniza are an invaluable source for the study of legal history in medieval Egypt. The Geniza contains a plethora of court records -which occasionally allude to "Arabic documents" admitted into the Jewish court. What role did these documents play in the decisions of the Jewish court? In this paper, I survey the court records of the Geniza in order to explore legal pluralism in the Fāṭimid and Ayyūbid periods, revealing the court to have been a focal point of ḏimmī-Muslim relations in the 10th-13th centuries. As the longunderstood legal pluralism of the Fāṭimid period gave way to Ayyūbid support of Šāfiʿī jurists in the late 12th century, I will show Jewish courts which long recognized documents composed in Muslim courts and which even composed their own documents in a manner that might have allowed them to be read into evidence in Muslim courts to have attempted to limit ḏimmī use of Muslim courts and to arrogate to themselves alone the power to adjudicate matters of interest to the Jewish community. I bring evidence of forum-shopping and legal pluralism between Muslim and ḏimmī courts, and I trace the waxing and waning of this pluralism against the historical trajectory of the medieval period in Egypt, giving particular attention to the court of Abraham Maimonides, which (I will argue) responded to an environment of decreasing legal pluralism by arrogating to itself sole power to deal with certain legal issues. This response is particularly manifest in a resurgence of documents written in Hebrew instead of Judeo-Arabic.
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