Mapping Change in Islamic Law, Rules and Practices

This project launches a historical inquiry into the phenomenon of legal authority in Muslim religious law.

Sharia, a term that designated, for centuries, the Muslim jurists law, is undoubtedly a major issue in the Muslim world and, to a different degree, in Western societies today.

As representing Gods law in Muslim believes, Sharia is perceived as unchangeable, and, in Western scholarship often as a deontology.

MCILRaP takes a radically new approach in explaining the obvious paradox between timeless law and observable legal adaptations by studying legal casuistry, not single rules.

In casuistry, rules are fixed as laws; and adding rules for specific or other cases limits existing rules application and allows for different solutions, which may be viewed as a legal change.

To describe the casuistry of the jurists law for the first time in detail, MCILRaP creates a new method of mapping rulings in context. Thousands of law books and other juridical texts constitute relics of legal thinking in its redaction period.

MCILRaP pioneers a comprehensive survey of this source material that necessarily proceeds at different analytical levels, by: a) widely cataloguing works according to author and subject-matter, b) the in-depth mapping of juridical rules in selected law books, and c) determining the conceptual links between juridical rules and detailed real case practices.The project creates a dataset from original source material and devises tools for visualising legal casuistry.

By its research on Islamic law, MCILRaP provides evidence for historical law developments that turned Sharia, formerly only Revealed Law, into a juridical rule system that lasted until the 19th century.

The centuries-long impact of Sharia law on Muslim culture is what has triggered todays understanding of sacred Sharia laws in the Quran and Prophetic Tradition.

MILRaP will open new paths of inquiry, create methods and data, and by this fundamentally change the study of Islamic law.