LUCIS Visiting Fellow Lecture
Juridical Practices: Evidence from Documents, Procedural Fiqh-law and Legal Responae
- Date
- Wednesday 8 May 2019
- Time
- Explanation
- Free to visit; please register
- Series
- LUCIS Visiting Fellow: Christian Müller
- Location
-
P.N. van Eyckhof 3
P.N. van Eyckhof 3
2311 BV Leiden - Room
- 005

This lecture challenges the paradigm of a theory-practice antagonism in Islamic law that prevailed in modern scholarship. As oral attestation, acknowledgement and judicial oath are the only accepted means of proof, juridical thinking provided a theory that combined the writing of an attestation in a document with its oral performance in a court of law. By drawing from a variety of authentical legal documents and juridical theory on procedure in a strictly synchronical juxtaposition, the changing ways of writing documents and its use as legal argument and proof-instrument become obvious. This and other examples demonstrate how juridical rules focused on practice, how juridical practice influenced the re-evaluation of transmitted authoritative rules and finally, in what ways judges authenticated and validated judgement-documents according to later sharia-law rules.