Focusing on the eighteenth century, this chapter uses the surviving books from the manuscript library of the Buffalo Agency to reveal how Ibadi intellectual, religious, and commercial life in Ottoman Cairo intersected with that of their non-Ibadi contemporaries. Beyond funding the endowment for students at the Buffalo Agency, Ibadi merchants were also often the ones responsible for gifting or commissioning the books in its library. The books themselves included roughly equal numbers of Sunni and Ibadi titles. It traces the relationship of Ibadis with the famous (Sunni) al-Azhar Mosque and how the library of the Buffalo Agency reflects this relationship. In all cases, from the production of books to their endowment and use by students, Ibadis mirror the social and religious trends of their Sunni contemporaries in the Ottoman period.

This chapter demonstrates how Ibadis, whether merchants or scholars, participated in the everyday legal life of Ottoman Cairo by using its shariah courts. It does so by focusing on two Ibadis living in seventeenth-century Cairo: a merchant named ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Baḥḥār and a scholar named Muḥammad Abī Sitta. The variety of ways in which both men used the court system demonstrates its importance to Ibadi merchants and scholars in the Ottoman period. The chapter’s overarching theme is how Ibadis used the legal tools of Ottoman Cairo, waqf property, and inheritance courts to navigate their everyday lives.

Paths to a liberal order are not limited to those followed by Western countries. A possible Middle Eastern starting point was zakat, Islam’s only “pillar” with an explicitly economic function. Zakat appears in the Quran as a system that finances designated state expenses through a tax on wealth and income. The rates were low by the standards of Antiquity, and they were fixed. Besides, the payment of zakat legitimated the underlying wealth or income. Hence, it could have served as the foundation for political checks and balances based on secure private ownership. Yet zakat’s specifics were suited specifically to Arabia; it left out major sources of income and wealth in the broader Middle East. For these reasons alone, rulers imposed extra-Islamic taxes. Having set precedents for arbitrary taxation, they then essentially stopped enforcing zakat. A Quran-based Islamic institution for empowering the individual against the state thus turned into a minor device for local poor relief. The waqf’s emergence in the 700s as a core Islamic institution was a creative response to zakat’s abandonment as a state-enforced transfer system. Its unintended effects, such as the persistent weakness of civil society, are rooted, then, in zakat’s loss of relevance to Islamic governance.

This chapter discusses how Saudi women have actively negotiated gender boundaries and expanded their scope through the daily practice of charity work and the networks established among fellow social workers and volunteers. Founded in 1961–2 as a women-only initiative, the First Women’s Welfare Association in Jeddah counts among the oldest extant welfare associations in the kingdom enlisted with the Ministry of Social Affairs. The longue-durée perspective adopted in the chapter pays attention to the changing aspirations of different generations involved with the charity organization.

Although the First Women’s Welfare Association is often considered a "traditional charity" with an "Islamic aid" approach, its focus on single women, female-headed households, and the feminization of poverty transgresses traditional norms in multiple ways. The chapter discusses the charity’s use of donations, zakat and ṣadaqa, food banks, endowments, and shelters for single women and female-headed households. By situating practices of almsgiving within the wider legal and political framework of the zakat tax imposed by the Saudi state, as well as within the context of further legislation targeting money laundering and terrorist financing, the research highlights that religious ideals are subject to interpretation and object to various authoritative claims.

The authority of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī, the second in the canonical sequence of envoys, emerged around the time when the old guard agents of the eleventh Imam were dying, two decades after the Imam’s death. The process of back-projection of the envoy paradigm to the earliest phase of the Occultation has obscured details of Abū Jaʿfar’s life, but we can piece together, in Chapter 5, some details from reports of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar from both skeptical agents and rival charismatic bābs. He established his authority through his father’s prestige, by forging alliances with other agents, by repudiating doubters, and issuing rescripts (tawqīʿāt) in the name of the hidden Imam. He also attempted to maintain revenues, giving concessions and dispensations for alms taxes, while asserting the legitimacy of the Imamic agents to continue revenue-collection, particularly from waqf endowments and Imamic estates. Through these activities he established the office of envoy firmly enough to survive him.

The physical setting for Ahmad-i Jam’s shrine is sketched. The shrine lay in the middle of a perilous tract of Greater Iran (Iranshahr), one that witnessed the crisscrossing of armies from Europe and Asia. Paradoxically, while post-Mongol Khurasan lay in ruins, the shrine’s first major edifice was erected in 633/1236. Consequent to Ilkhanid-, Kartid-, and Timurid-period benefactions, an eclectic architectural ensemble characterized the shrine, which became a shrine complex. The architectural contours were frozen (ca. 844–46/1440–43). Recent developments – facilitated partly by the Islamic Republic of Iran – have “unfrozen” the architectural contours. The architectural ensemble and the administration of Ahmad-i Jam’s shrine are described.

Why is the ecological potential of Sharia’not exploited for the protection of our planet today? This chapter reports the analyses of philosophers, economists and historians on the causes of the decline of one of the most important institution of the Sharia': the Waqf. From these analyses it is easy to understand why the environmental Waqf stopped functioning.

There is no discipline called “Islamic environmental law”. While Islamic law is proclaimed as a source of the legal system in the constitutions of Muslim countries, it is generally not used for the purpose of nature conservation. However, we can find in Islamic law a theoretical and practical foundation for environmental law. All sources of Islamic law can be used for this purpose as they all have a potential ecological application. This chapter explores the sources of Islamic law in order to find avenues to Islamic environmental law and the Atrmospheric Waqf paradigm. In this regard, it analyzes two of the main important legal instruments that could be dedicated to the protection of natural resources and limit climate change impacts (Waqf and Hima).

Religion can play a considerable role in the protection of natural resources. The Ecological Spirituality movement is enjoying growing success crowned by the UNEP Faith for Earth initiative. In Muslim countries this movement is emerging. However, it has not yet been able to extensively exploit the law. Indeed, the particularity of the religion of Islam is that it is intertwined with the law. Consequently, this is an opportunityto strengthen environmental law. There are at least six reasons that explain the interest of the extension of Ecological Spirituality in the sphere of environmental law. These same reasons also explain the urgency of adopting a new research agenda in the field of environmental law in Muslim countries.