Legal History in the Middle East

This course is devoted to exploring questions of law and legal history in the Middle East/eastern Mediterranean region from late antiquity to the present. Emphasis will be on the Islamic legal tradition from medieval to modern times, including intersection-and-friction points between the shari‘a and Roman, Persianate, and Mongol imperial legacies, and fellow Abrahamic faiths. From the earliest schools of Islamic jurisprudence to late Ottoman constitutionalism, and the sociolegal impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the Arab Spring uprisings, our goal is to explore the depth and diversity of legal cultures and institutions across different epochs of Middle East history.