New Approaches to Islamic Law and the Documentary Record before 1500

Marina Rustow notes how prevalent scholarly attention is to long-form texts of Islamic law—attention that she argues, comes at the expense of studying Islamic legal documents in a sufficient manner. Study of the documents is an indispensable enterprise if we are to fully understand “how law worked in practice.” In view of what we know to have been “heaps” of documents produced by Muslim judges and notaries, Rustow underscores how particularly noticeable a disjuncture there is between those documents and the long-form texts. Moreover, scholars often skip over and thus fail to avail themselves of the utility of documents in adding texture to social and legal history. She cautions social historians against “pseudo-knowledge,” that is, the temptation to overlook complex factors, usually embedded in legal documents, that render our otherwise tame scholarly perception of the past truer but more “unruly.” In the end, her invitation to join her in the study of documents and thereby improve the state of Islamic legal history is terse and timely: “Please go find yourself some documents.”