ABSTRACT
The editors of this volume are comfortable acknowledging that, since it is not the first, this is ‘one more’ survey of scholarship in the field of Islamic law and jurisprudence. The editors are also comfortable claiming that this volume is a corrective to omissions and imbalances in existing publications in the field and an attempt to nuance its common interpretive lenses. The term used to indicate our study field in the title (Islamic law), bowing to the conventions of anglicization and academic practice, must be taken as a shorthand, pointing to an old and living tradition of jurisprudence, religious and political laws, ethics and socialization. At the hands of today’s academics, it is a subject, or a set of subjects, with a large number of entanglements. This volume’s explicit aim is to cover Islamic law’s multiple connections with the hope that the reader will be able to take it as a starting point toward a more detailed inquiry of its multiple parts and its intersections with other fields. The volume demonstrates that scholars with interest in Islamic law are clearly interested in much more than Islamic law. The impact of theory-shopping and method-shopping from other fields is considerable. Islamic legal studies scholars do, to put it simply, read outside of their narrow area of specialization. Whether scholars of other fields read Islamic law scholarship to the same extent is another matter. We hope this volume will contribute to an acceleration of interest by non-Islamic law scholars in this complex field that goes by the title Islamic Law.
