QuantISLAMS · Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State: Shari'a in Moroccan Courts, 1912-2012

Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State: Shari'a in Moroccan Courts, 1912-2012

Religious law endures as a critical component of legal systems in the Middle East and North Africa. The specific role of Islamic law in state courts remains intensely contested by scholars, policy makers, and activists alike. The project “Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State” embraced these debates to interrogate the role of Islamic legal tradition in determining courtroom outcomes. The rules of Islamic law are outwardly based on centuries-old scripture and legal texts, yet since the mid-twentieth century, Muslim-majority nations worldwide have legislated Islamic law-based codes to standardize its rules. The state-imposed codification of Islamic law has gained immense attention from historians and anthropologists, who question whether a religious tradition can truly exist as state legislation. States further have limited these codes primarily to family law, making them the center of scrutiny for assessing ongoing inequalities of women and minority groups. However, such lines of inquiry predominantly account for Islamic law by highlighting discrepancies between classical Islamic legal texts and state codes. Nevertheless, legal scholars long have recognized that legal texts do not necessarily reflect law in practice, especially in Islamic legal contexts. Stakeholders of Islamic law have little indication of how judges themselves determined Islamic law-based rulings in the courtroom in modern states. This issue raises a deeper question with critical implications for the future of religious law: to what extent does Islamic law transform if state legislators—and not religious scholars—dictate its functioning? This project contends that understanding the impact of modern state institutions requires establishing what Islamic law was in the era directly prior to their installation. “Quantifying Islamic Law” uses methods of statistical text analysis to reconstruct Islamic legal tradition in court practice prior to state codification of shari’a. It does so in the context of Morocco, a nation with a rich Islamic legal tradition and a contemporary government that claims to uphold it through its codified family law. Using a corpus of approximately 800 judgements issued by the Supreme Council of Shariʿa Appeals (SCSA, 1921-1957), “Quantifying Islamic Law” tracks references to core sources of Islamic legal tradition: jurists and their texts. In their aggregate, the judgements demonstrate how Moroccan judges deployed a particular tradition comprised of Islamic legal texts, local customs, and/or state legislation. The project therefore uses the citation data to center judges’ cumulative vision of Islamic legal tradition. Doing so transcends the often-blatant political language of state legislation or the voluminous and systematic Islamic textual tradition. The cumulative data from this corpus of judgements provides a new quantitative basis for understanding the most important sources of Islamic law as invoked by judges in a local and contextualized legal field.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз