This chapter explores a 1912 legal opinion (fatwā) by the Iranian Twelver Shīʿī jurist Muḥammad Ḥusayn Fishārakī (d. 1353/1935) on a dispute over the ownership of two villages, Jayshī and Saryān, both of which were endowed and had been illegally sold by a trustee in order to escape his various financial troubles. The fatwā upholds the legitimacy of the endowments (sing. waqf) and finds that their sale had been unlawful. The source sheds light on how Islamic law in modern and early modern Iran often operated outside the context of state institutions.

This chapter explores four legal opinions (fatwās) of the Mauritanian jurist al-Qaṣrī b. Muḥammad (d. 1235/1819) from the Nawāzil al-Qaṣrī. Islamic law has typically been an urban discourse produced by scholars based in cities, but from the 17th century onwards, the emergence of nomadic groups specialising in religious studies fostered the spread of Islamic literacy and law in the trans-Saharan region. This rural juristic activity, produced away from the cities and among pastoralist and other non-sedentary groups, differed from that of the urban jurists, and is available in the form of ‘case collections’ (nawāzil), responsa (ajwiba) and archival documents that allow us to write the cultural and social history of pre-colonial West Africa from an insider’s perspective.

This chapter explores the 2012 legal opinion (fatwā) issued by the Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʾ—the body officially tasked with providing Islamic legal advice by the Egyptian state—on women’s capacity to serve as heads of state. In the course of discussing the issue, the authors apologetically asserts that there is not and has never been a ‘woman question’ in Islam, i.e. that there has never been any restriction on women’s agency ‘in Islam’ per se and that women are not in the least bit excluded from acting in the public sphere. The authors present examples of Muslim women serving as heads of state, judges and in other executive and public order roles, as well as minority legal opinions, in order to demonstrate their contention.

This chapter explores an extremely involved and technical debate on the dynamics of marriage and divorce among adherents of the Shāfiʿī school of law in Kerala, specifically the intervention of the Keralite jurisconsult ʿAbd Allāh Musliyār (b. ?). The issue in question is the validity of a declaration of unilateral repudiation (ṭalāq) using a particular grammatical construction uttered in front of the husband’s mother-in-law (known locally as the ‘Valapuram Ṭalāq’ case). The effectiveness of this particular form of divorce continues to divide jurists in the community in question, all of whom defer to the authority of the same canonical legal texts, namely the Tuḥfat al-Muḥtāj of Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 974/1566), the Nihāyat al-Muḥtāj of Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī (d. 1004/1596) and the Fatḥ al-Muʿīn of the prominent Keralite jurist Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī (d. 991/1583).