O'Donnell's "Basic Bibliography" of Islam & Jurisprudence

Patrick S. O’Donnell, bibliographer extraordinaire, has posted Islam & Jurisprudence (or, ‘Islamic Law’): A Basic Bibliography.  As he explains over on Ratio Juris:

I have completed my latest bibliography, on Islam and Jurisprudence, available here. The introduction:

This compilation, like most of my bibliographies, has two constraints: books, in English. I trust the inference will not be made that this implies the best works are only in English, as it merely reflects the limits of my knowledge and research. “Jurisprudence” in this case can refer to Islamic philosophy and/or theory of law, as well as historical and existing legal systems in those countries in which Islam is (i) a state-sanctioned religion, (ii) predominant as a religious orientation in the society, (iii) or has a significant impact on the country’s legal system in one way or another. I have used the phrase “Islam and Jurisprudence” for the title to reflect the fact that it is a perilous endeavor to conclusively identify, except perhaps philosophically or theologically (and even then, there are inherent problems), Islamic law as such (i.e., in any kind of absolutist or ‘pure’ sense) in legal systems on the ground, as we say, even if we rightly derive warrant for this appellation from both emic and etic reasons. This list does not aspire to be exhaustive, although I hope it is at least representative of the depth and breadth of the available literature. I welcome suggestions for titles I may have inadvertently missed.

LHR 36:1

Law and History Review 36:1 (February 2018)  is now available on Cambridge Core.

In This Issue
Gautham Rao

Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68
Adriana Chira

Russian Capitalism on Trial: The Case of the Jacks of Hearts
Sergei Antonov

Law, Custom, and Social Norms: Civil Adjudications in Qing and Republican China
Xiaoqun Xu

Beneath Sovereignty: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
David Todd

“On the other hand the accused is a woman…”: Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland
Lynsey Black

New Takes on Jim Crow: A Review of Recent Scholarship
Anders Walker

Book Reviews
Steve Pincus , The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2016.  Reviewed by Claire Priest

Wendell Bird , Press and Speech under Assault: The Early Supreme Court Justices, the Sedition Act of 1798, and the Campaign Against Dissent, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Reviewed by Britt P. Tevis

Alfred L. Brophy , University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Reviewed byJohn W. Wertheimer

James T. Kloppenberg , Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Reviewed by R. B. Bernstein

Nicholas L. Syrett , American Child Bride. A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Reviewed by Geraldine Gudefin

A. Naomi Paik , Rightlessness: Testimony and Legal Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Reviewed by Torrie Hester

Jefferson Decker , The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Reviewed by Ann Southworth

Kimmel on conversion in early modern Spain

Out with the University of Chicago Press' Law and Society series, we missed this one when it appeared in 2015. Seth Kimmel (Columbia University) has published Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the end of Islamic Spain. The book was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Award in 2017. From the press:

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however, Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly innovation.

In its careful examination of how Spanish authors transformed the history of scholarship through debate about forced religious conversion, Parables of Coercion makes us rethink what we mean by tolerance and intolerance, and shows that debates about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over the methods and practices that demarcated one scholarly discipline from another.

 Praise for the book:

"In Parables of Coercion Kimmel succeeds wonderfully in excavating the intersection of early modern Spanish socioreligious and intellectual history and in deciphering its various discourses....Kimmel further uncovers the dialectical relationship between socioreligious discord and innovative cultural production by religious intellectuals in seventeenth-century Spain, and in the process he manages brilliantly to render meaningless the conventional, simplistic characterization of early modern Spain as a purely intolerant society. It was far more complicated during the sixteenth century afterlife of Islamic Spain than historiographical orthodoxy suggests." -Modern Philology

"Ranging across canon law, sacred philology, and history in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, Seth Kimmel aims to demonstrate how the phenomenon of Muslim converts to Christianity was entertained by experts in those disciplines, as well as the ways in which the Morisco question affected the disciplines themselves." -Renaissance Quarterly

"Kimmel has written a fascinating study of the learned cultures built out of a century of Spanish Christian intolerance toward Islam, beginning with the coerced conversion of Spain's Muslims to Christianity in the early sixteenth century, to the expulsion of the Moriscos (as the converts and their descendants were called) in the early seventeenth. He shows us how the evolving  'Morisco question' animated the emergence of disciplines such as philology, history, theology, political theory, and economics. In the process, he provides us with an alternate and disquieting history of our own scholarly, political, and religious practices." -David Nirenberg

Further information is available here.