ebooks Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald L. Posner; John Ware in History

Description

In Pragmatism in Islamic Law; Ibrahim presents a detailed history of Sunni legal pluralism and the ways in which it was employed to accommodate the changing needs of society. Since the formative period of Islamic law; jurists have debated whether it is acceptable for a law to be selected based on its utility; rather than weighing conflicting articulations of the law to determine the most likely expression of the divine will. Virtually unanimous opposition to the utilitarian approach; referred to as “pragmatic eclecticism;” emerged among early Islamic jurists. However; due to a host of changing institutional and socioeconomic transformations; a trend toward the legitimization of pragmatic eclecticism arose in the thirteenth century. Subsequently; the Mamluk authorities institutionalized this pragmatism when Sultan Baybars appointed four chief judges representing the four Sunni schools in Cairo in 1265 CE. After a brief attempt to reverse Mamluk pluralism by imposing the Hanafi school in the sixteenth century; Egypt’s new rulers; the Ottomans; embraced this pluralistic pragmatism. In examining over a thousand cases from three seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Egyptian courts; Ibrahim traces the internal logic of pragmatic eclecticismunder the Ottomans. An array of archival sources documents the manner in which Egyptian society’s subaltern classes navigated Sunni legal pluralism as a tool to avoid more austere legal doctrines. The ensuing portrait challenges the assumption made by many modern historians that the utilitarian approaches adopted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim reformers constituted a clear rupture with early Islamic legal history. In contrast; many of the legal strategiesexercised in Egypt’s partial codification of family law in the twentieth century were rooted in premodern Islamic jurisprudence.