On Thursday, 12 February at 7 p.m., Professor Christian Müller (CNRS) will present the ninth session of the cycle Aula Árabe Universitaria 7 at Casa Árabe in Madrid, where he will talk about case law regulations and the role of jurists between the 8th and 19th centuries. Free admission until capacity is complete. Conference in English with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish.
The lecture by Christian Müller, research professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, analyses “Islamic law and its practice” as the interaction between major human actors (such as jurists and judges), Islamic normativity (laws) and social performance (court cases), from the 8th to 19th centuries.
To this end, Müller examines the system of judicial decisions and the role of Muslim jurists (fuqahā’) in their development and transmission within the schools of jurisprudence as social institutions.
It focuses particularly on the level of detail of the case-law regulations, which gave authority, far beyond religious prescriptions, to the decisions of jurists in various fields of law. In particular, resolutions on economic transactions, family life, inheritance, corporal offences and procedural rules provided a very sophisticated legalistic framework that affected people’s daily lives in many ways.
Knowledge of “Islamic law as a legal system” is based on a variety of abundant sources, such as legal manuals, compilations of fatwas, legal documents, bibliographic dictionaries and historical accounts. From these sources, the paper of professor Müller will address two historical transformations: first, the emancipation of the schools of jurisprudence from the legislative power of the first caliphs through an authoritarian normative system that refers to the «Islamic foundations» from the tenth century. The second is the imposition of the sacredness of legal doctrines as “sharia” from the thirteenth century onwards.
These phenomena persisted over time in various forms under different political regimes, from Muslim Spain in the west to Central Asia and Southeast Asia in the east. This allows us to consider the practice of Islamic law as a key phenomenon in pre-modern history.
Adday Hernández López, Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at UCM, will present the session to the speaker and make a first comment on the presentation by Daniel Gil Flores, coordinator of the master’s degree and also Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at that university. The session will be moderated by Olivia Orozco de la Torre, coordinator of Education and Economics at Casa Árabe.