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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 eclecticism under 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 strategies exercised in Egypt's partial codification of family law in the twentieth century were rooted in premodern Islamic jurisprudence.

Islamic law --- Procedure (Islamic law) --- Jurisdiction (Islamic law) --- History.

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Criminal law (Islamic law) --- Criminal procedure (Islamic law) --- Islamic law --- Criminal law (Islamic law). --- Criminal procedure (Islamic law). --- Droit pénal

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Most studies on Islamic, Arab and Ottoman societies are content with the role of testimony that texts available to researchers can play, thus reducing the role of text and language to a mimetic description of past events. The point here is to show that any understanding of social relations implies, first, to consider the textual production of a society by questioning the meaning assignable to the texts themselves. It also supposes that the analysis of texts, whatever their societal and institutional context, must consider its sources as discursive practices, in order not to reduce them to their preliminary function of factual testimony. Drawing on a wide variety of Ottoman "legal" texts produced in Beirut and Damascus in the 19th century, this book avoids linking these texts to the normative values ​​of “Islamic law”, but on the contrary documents the way in which discursive practices operate concretely on a specific terrain. Different levels of practices then emerge, all documented by the social actors who made their very existence possible.

Judicial process (Islamic law) --- Procedure (Islamic law) --- Evidence, Documentary (Islamic law) --- Law, Politics & Government --- Canon Law --- Islamic law --- droit islamique --- économie --- waqf --- justice --- droit