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27 Islamic L. & Soc'y 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/islamls27 and id is 1 raw text is: ISLAMIC LAW AND SOCIETY 27 (2020) 1-4 Islamic Law and Society BRILL brillcom/ils Islam and Politics: From the Margins to the Center This theme issue, Islam and Politics: From the Margins to the Center, originated in a workshop of the same name that I co-organized with David Powers at Cornell University in April 2019. The workshop sought to broaden the study of Islam and politics beyond theories and institutions of Islamic rule by focusing on a series of concrete practices that have upheld or challenged Islamic law. Through this focus on practice, it explored contestations to define public morality, political legitimacy, and what it means to be a Muslim. During the workshop, historians and anthropologists examined the capacity of ostensibly marginal sites and religious practices to shape religious authority and bound- aries. By emphasizing the far-reaching significance of local practice, this work- shop offered an alternative template for the study of the relationship between Islam and politics and highlighted the continuities and ruptures in these dynamics over the past fourteen centuries. The four articles in this theme issue seek to answer these and other ques- tions relating to the theme of Islam and politics. In Islamic Law on the Pro- vincial Margins: Christian Patrons and Muslim Notaries in Upper Egypt, 2nd-5th/8th-uth Centuries, Lev Weitz reconstructs the interaction between Coptic Christians and Islamic legal institutions in provincial Egypt on the basis of a corpus of 193 Arabic legal documents, as well as relevant Coptic ones. He argues that in the 3rd/9th century, Christians began to make routine use of Islamic legal institutions to organize their economic affairs, especially inheritance. They did so in preference to the Christian authorities and Coptic deeds that had been their standard resource in the first two centuries of Mus- lim rule. The changing character of the Egyptian judiciary encouraged this shift in practice, as qdads who adhered tofiqh procedural rules increasingly filled judicial roles formerly held by local administrative officials, Christian and Muslim. By eschewing and nudging into disuse a previously vital Coptic legal tradition, Christian provincials participated in the Islamization of 'Abbasid and Fatimid Egypt. In Scholars, Spice Traders and Sultans: Arguing over the Spice Tax in the Mamluk Era, Joel Blecher moves from the religious margins to center, examin- ing why and how Mamluk jurists routinely resisted the sultanate's attempt to broaden the collection of zakat, the alms-tax. Many modern scholars argue that prominent jurists lost sight of the moral stakes of zakat and developed © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2020 DOI:10.1163/15685195-02712P01

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