Law and Sovereignty: Criminal Justice in Premodern Islam

Abstract

My dissertation, “Law and Sovereignty: Criminal Justice in Premodern Islam,” represents a comprehensive study of the development and application of criminal justice within premodern Islamic societies (600-1200) in the Near East and the Mediterranean. The shurṭa, originally the elite military corps of the Abbasid caliphs, personified imperial sovereignty over law and urban space, and represented the legal dichotomy and political-religious divide inherent in premodern Islamic law. The institutional and legal metamorphosis that irrevocably shaped both the application of the law and society can be understood by tracing the emergence of the shurṭa. The shurṭa became the chief overseers of criminal justice and law in the Islamic metropolises of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. Most notably, the shurṭa’s supremacy over criminal law came at the expense of jurists and judges. These experts on law and the proponents of sharīʿa (sacred law) were excluded by the Abbasids from criminal justice. The Abbasids enacted policies that overruled sharīʿa and empowered the shurṭa, preserving their authority by maintaining complete control of a crucial legal sphere: criminal law. With this extraordinary development, Islamic law became divided. The shurṭa enforced a governmental law, developed and elaborated on by the scribal classes. Later in the tenth century, this political-administrative framework became known as siyāsa (governmental law). This jurisdictional split bifurcated Islamic law and established a religious-political divide throughout the Islamic world: sharīʿa (sacred law) and siyāsa (governmental law). My research reveals the Abbasid legacy of this divide and its momentous impact on society, law, and literature, which then continued into later Islamic societies, such as those of the Buyids, Saljūqs, and Fatimids, until the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire.