Conventional approaches to studying the relationship between Jewish and Islamic legal traditions often places them in a linear relationship and seeks to identify the textual ‘borrowing’ and ‘influences’ from the older tradition to the younger one. However, texts were only one component of knowledge production and dissemination since oral composition and transmission were normative in the late...
This paper will survey and categorize the Qurʾān’s allusions to Biblical and Rabbinic law. My primary aim is to illuminate understudied aspects of both Qurʾānic law and Qurʾānic theology. A secondary aim is to consider the importance of these allusions with regard to sura form and composition. Although older scholarship on the Qurʾān plumbed Rabbinic and Biblical literature intensively for...
During the pilgrimage to Mecca in the year 10/632, Muḥammad is said to have delivered an oration to a large audience of believers. Since the event occurred shortly before his death, the oration is commonly known as the Farewell Sermon. Different variants of the Farewell Sermon have been preserved in a number of historical texts, ḥadīṯ compendia, and literary works. The sermon includes mostly...
Abū al-Farağ ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Ṭayyib (10th-11th c.) is one of the most important Christian authors of his time. He was an East Syrian Christian, i.e. belonged to the Church of the East also known as the Nestorian church, and was a physician, philosopher and also theologian. He wrote many works on medicine, commentaries on most of the works of Aristotle, Galen and Hippocrates, exegetical works...
The Halakhot Gedolot, the ‘Large (collection of) Halakhot’, is an early codification of Talmudic halakhah, generally attributed to Simeon Qayyara and dated to the second half of the ninth century. It exists in two textual versions, the ‘Babylonian’ version first published in Venice 1548, and the ‘Sefardic’ or ‘North African’ version, published by Azriel Hildesheimer in 1892 on the basis of a...
While working on Geonic scripts from around the 10th Century of the Babylonian diaspora, written in Judaeo-Arabic, I have noted a widespread and interesting Medievalist phenomenon whereby authors quote almost exclusively from previous authoritative-canonized sources, mainly from the Babylonian Talmud itself. They do not, on the other hand, quote from their predecessors or contemporaries...
Marriages of minor girls were common in the medieval Jewish society from the 10th century until the 14th and beyond. Despite this, it was only in Muslim countries that fundamental objection to this phenomenon was present. The accepted assumption in research is that the status of the Jewish woman in medieval Germany was superior to that of her counterparts in other communities. At face value,...
The Yalkut Shimoni compiles important annotations from rabbinic literature to each book of the Hebrew Bible. The voluminous commentary cites more than 50 traditional rabbinic texts including sources which have been lost. Most academic research on the Yalkut Shimoni has focused on reconstructing these lost sources such as Midrash Jelamdenu, other research issues about Yalkut Shimoni have been...
The significance of the concept of ‘testimony’ permeates Islamic jurisprudence and it is invoked in Arabic literary texts as well. Islamic law emphasises the role of trustworthy legal witnesses in establishing the facts of any legal case and has developed a sophisticated system of ascertaining the integrity of witnesses and weighing the evidence offered by witnesses deemed acceptable. Indeed,...
References to sources in pre-modern Islamic writings of all genres can be the cause of great frustration. In many cases, references are simply absent; in others, book titles are regularly ignored in favor of references to authors; furthermore, some references to authors are maddeningly oblique: ‘the Judge,’ ‘one of the Muʿtazila,’ ‘a certain Šāfiʿī [jurist],’ ‘one of the sons of our age,’ or...
What are the conditions for meaning-making in intertextuality? The paper explores what the relational dynamics of (legal) transtextuality can reveal about the semiotic hierarchies that govern them. The interest in these relational dynamics goes beyond the specific relations between texts captured by the hypo-/hyper-text relation. Rather, it embraces the inner conditions of meaning-making in...
Just as the modern era put challenges before Muslim reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Egypt who sought a middle path between tradition and modern conditions, Jewish religious authorities understood that modernity brought in fundamental changes that require creative Jewish responses. The British conquest of Egypt, the influx of Jewish immigrants to the land of the Nile, and...
The jurisdictional authority of courts in Egypt was a key administrative tool deployed by the Egyptian political and legal elite to shape emerging institutions since the mid-19th century. I maintain that the structural reconfiguration of the legal and judicial institutions in Egypt has not only given a wide jurisdictional mandate for the new secular National Courts since their inception in...