Ph.D. Candidate, NELC, University of Chicago
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
"Codicology and the Transformation of Islamic Law
A First Assessment of the Tarjīḥāt al-bayyināt in the Princeton Garrett Collection"
Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 2023.
In Islamic law, preponderance (tarjīḥ)—a practical method for mujtahids to resolve legal contradictions (taʿāruḍ) between proofs—has been known in the uṣūl tradition from at least the tenth-century jurist al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981). Yet it is in several seventeenth and eighteenth-century Arabic and Ottoman manuscripts of Princeton’s Garrett collection that we encounter summary-like lists labeled “tarjīḥāt al-bayyināt” (“TBs”), which succinctly compile the complex rules of preponderance. Organized into three-columned lists, on loose leaves, as annotations in the margin or separate textual units, the TBs follow a grammatical and visual layout that made them predictable and recognizable for manuscript readers. This paper examines the TBs as a codicological phenomenon, arguing that they served as a shorthand for legal practitioners familiar with evidentiary law and that their presence suggests a broader transformative process of readers/legal practitioners’ relationship with codices of positive law at this critical moment in the history of Islamic law.
.jpg)
Mahr-Agreements, US Courts, and the Predicament of Muslim Women"
Harvard Journal of Islamic Law, 2021.
As a reciprocal contract, Islamic marriage (nikāḥ) furnishes rights and obligations for both spouses. Usually split into two portions, the deferred part of the bridal dower (mahr muʾakhkhar)—a one-time financial liability that both spouses agree on during the wedding proceedings—is customarily received by the Muslim wife where her husband seeks to divorce her unilaterally (ṭalāq). However, US courts faced with construing mahr-agreements have been reluctant to enforce the financial promises stipulated in such agreements. Based on evidence gathered from case law, this article argues that a combination of several factors, most importantly, the judicial anxiety to get involved in religious doctrinal interpretation, as well as the misinformed analogizing of bridal dowers to prenuptial agreements, adversely affects Muslim women as courts increasingly adhere to the presumption that mahr-agreements are non-enforceable, squarely placing the burden of proof to the contrary on women. Moreover, women's financial hardship is often the immediate result of the court's refusal to uphold a husband's commitment to pay dower. As a critical feature of Islamic marriage, the agreed-on dower payment assures financial stability after divorce, predictability, and women's bargaining power throughout a marital relationship. Since 2013, state legislators' partially successful endeavors to bar state courts from applying Islamic law under comity function as a compounding factor that has created dire prospects for the future of mahr-agreements in the US, posing a substantial risk not only to the institution of Islamic marriage, but also the parties’ freedom of contract.
Monographs
Arbeitsmaterialien zum Orient, 32, Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2019.
[MA Thesis]
Can elites use cosmological imagery to sanction marital and slavery practices for their political aspirations? Can interactions between Late Antique legal systems be thought beyond borrowings? This work studies legal writings from the Zoroastrian, East Syrian, and Islamic traditions arguing that Late Antique matrimonial and slavery practices were significantly informed by cosmological imagery and repeatedly brought in line with the elites' political aspirations. It suggests that these legal traditions should be thought in a shared epistemic framework to account for the changes and meaningfulness of legal concepts and institutions and cannot simply be reduced to a narrative of borrowings. Instead, this book shows that interactions between Late Antique legal systems were more complex and characterized by patterns of negotiation and competition mirroring the various entanglements of the Late Antique citizen's life.
Chapters in edited volumes
"A Toponymical Survey of Beth Qatraye"
with Haya Al Thani, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif al-Murikhi, Abdul Rahman Chamseddine, David A. Michelson, William L. Potter, and Mario Kozah.
Beth Qaṭraye. A Lexical and Toponymical Survey. Eds. Mario Kozah, George Kiraz, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Haya Al Thani, and Saif Al-Murikhi. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2021: 107–173.
The geographical and historical data presented in this chapter (and more extensively online) was gathered as part of the Beth Qaṭraye Gazetteer collaborative research project that was enabled through the financial and institutional support of Qatar University, the Qatar National Research Fund, the American University of Beirut, Vanderbilt University, the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt, and Beth Mardutha. The project data was collected through a comprehensive analysis of Arabic and Syriac primary texts, including Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, ʿAbd Allāh al-Bakrī, Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī, Nāṣir Khusraw, Ibn Jubayr, al-Maqdisī, Ibn Ḥawqal, al-Masʿūdī, Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Ibn Rustah, Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadhānī, Yaʿqūbī, Ibn Khurradādhbih and the anonymous Chronicle of Seert, the Synodicon Orientale, and Paul Bedjan's Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum.
Book reviews
Review of Mariam Saeed El Ali's Akhbār Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid in the Islamic Sources: Frames of Narration, Memory, and History
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 2023.
Which Khadīja are we studying? Known to many as Muḥammad’s first wife and a wealthy tradeswoman, the Khadīja emerging from this careful analysis is much more multifaceted: she is at once the mother of the believers (umm al-muʾminīn), bearer of the truth of Islam (wazīrat ṣidq ʿalā al-islām), best of women in the worlds (khayr nisāʾ al-ʿālamīn), recipient of the archangel Gabriel’s greetings, a caring partner alarmed by Muḥammad’s eye injury, a woman of standing with a personal hairdresser (māshiṭa), and a generous mother gifting a necklace to her daughter. In this formidable study, Mariam Saeed El Ali approaches the khabar as a narrative structure (abniyat al-sard) that interweave various historical layers of information and affective relationships, which must be understood in the social and political contexts of transmitters and compilers in addition to that of the events they purport to describe. For El Ali, these narrative structures are not simply important by virtue of originating from within the early community of believers but because they enable historians to understand how specific images of Khadīja gradually crystallized in the centuries after. El Ali excavates the competing representations of Khadīja in the sources and puts them in conversation with the social and political forces that either privileged or sidelined them. The author examines why, despite the important role Khadīja assumed during her lifetime, she has received much less attention in the Islamic tradition and scholarly literature when compared to ʿĀʾisha or Fāṭima. Throughout the book, readers will loudly hear the echoes of Talal Asad’s methodological plea for studying Islam as a discursive tradition as the author eschews reducing her sources to historical vignettes frozen in time and emphasizes their significance as “living units” (waḥadāt ḥayawīya) that—transmitted across space, time, and genres—are subject to continuous reinterpretations in light of changing cultural and political discourses.
Journal of Religion, 2021.
In Islam and the Rule of Justice, Lawrence Rosen dismantles Western representations of Islamic law through a holistic analysis of Islamic legal concepts that attempts to place and comprehend their meanings within the orbit of Islamic ideas of justice. While uncovering the assumptions and the cultural logic in which these concepts are embedded, the book explores and colorfully paints the multifarious legal worlds of Islam. Yet, Rosen’s argument does not simply reiterate the cultural relativist lore that when contextualized properly, Islamic law is less atrocious than it seems to the Western observer. Instead, the author attempts the Herculean task of deliberating upon and diligently unpacking what an Islamic rule of justice looks like. His astute anthropological observations made in Moroccan courts and his legal training allow him to approach the law comparatively and to view legal precepts as culturally negotiated forms that are steeped in and indicative of particular understandings of the world.