HDS Course Listing

Registrar's Office

HDS 3621

Introduction to Islamic Law

Baber Johansen

Description

The course introduces beginners to the history of the \fiqh/, a system conceived of as the legal and ethical interpretation of the revealed texts of Islam, normally translated into English as "Islamic law." It will provide a description of the institutional background of this system's spread throughout the Muslim Empire and of the historical formation of its content and methodology until the 21st century. The relation between the rules of the \fiqh/ and the efforts, starting in the 9th century, to formulate a theory of legal sources and argumentation (the \usul al-fiqh/) will be discussed, but the complex legal matter of the \fiqh/ will not be reduced to such a theory of the sources of the law and the rules of legal argumentation. We will rather focus on the debate among Muslim jurists, from the 11th to the 15th century, on the legal or theological character of such a theory and on the relation between law and theology. Three characteristics of the \fiqh/ will be difficult to understand for law students in an American (or European) university: 1. the cult is an integral part of the law; 2. legal scholars and not political legislators have over most of the periods of Islamic law produced the norms of the fiqh and 3. it is licit for these scholars to uphold dissenting legal and ethical norms. The jurists' efforts to derive legal norms from revealed texts determined their specific approach to the Qur'an and distinguished it from that of the theologians. The fact that reasoning in Islam took place in this framework has played an important role in the 20th century debates on the place of Islamic law in the codes of law of modern nation states. We will, therefore, follow the development of these elements in the formative and classical periods of Islamic law.

Enrollment Limited: No
Open to BTI Students: Yes
Jointly offered through Harvard Law School

Course website

Scheduling

Half Course
Spring 2010
Tu., Th., 5-6:30
Location to be announced.

Relationship to Program Requirements

Program Requirement	Area / Category / Art / Designation
MTS Area(s) of Focus	Islamic Studies Religion, Ethics, and Politics
MDiv Distribution Category/ies	Islam
MDiv Art(s) of Ministry	none
ThM, pre-2007 MTS, and pre-2005 MDiv Area	Area 3
Language Course Designation(s)	n/a