Raquel Ukeles is curator of the Islam and Middle East collections of the National Library of Israel. In 2006 she earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University with the thesis „Innovation or Deviation? Exploring the Boundaries of Islamic Devotional Law“. Her main area of interest lies in the field of Islamic law and ritual. Ukeles held diverse academic positions, including Academic Director of Intellectual Encounters: Philosophy and Science in the World of Medieval Islam. During her academic career she was granted with several scholarships and awards. Among her latest articles are „Gender, Ritual, and the Parameters of Legal Change: The Debate over Women Imams in Contemporary Islam“, „The Lure of a Controversial Prayer: Salat al-ragha’ib (the prayer of great rewards) in medieval Arabic texts and from a socio-legal perspective“ and „Jurists’ Responses to Popular Devotional Practices in Medieval Islam.“

Curriculum Vitae

Module: Law and Legal Methodology

Legal Theory and Religious Practice in Medieval Islam

Islamic law is more than a system of laws but a world of norms, values and aspirations. Its main sources – the Qur'an and Hadith – provide guidance for all aspects of a person's life, including civil behavior, devotional practice, theology and ethics. In particular, the Prophet Muhammad served as the paradigm for religious behavior. The medieval Islamic legal tradition developed models and methods to interpret these canonical sources and to determine legal norms for all types of acts. The reality, however, proved to be quite a bit more messy – the Qur'an and Hadith did not always provide clear guidance and many religious practices developed that lacked clear links to the legal tradition. Moreover, political rulers intervened at times in religious practices, alternately lending support to jurists and to popular sentiment. Given the tension between legal theory and religious practice, jurists worked actively to preserve the authority of the legal tradition and its relevance in shaping Muslim religious life.

The course will examine the theoretical legal frameworks that medieval jurists built to assess religious acts and then will analyze how jurists applied these frameworks to popular religious practices. We will begin with an overview of Islamic law and its defining features, and will then examine several models of religious practice by leading medieval legal thinkers, such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya and al-Shatibi. We will also examine the different institutional roles of jurists and their interactions with political rulers. Third, we will analyze a number of case studies of medieval religious practices both from historical material and from legal treatises. Comparisons to medieval Jewish law under Islam on religious practices will highlight the consequences of different models for preserving the authority of the legal tradition and the link between canonical sources and religious practices.

The goal of the course will be to gain a basic understanding of Islamic law both in theory and in practice and to understand the dynamic processes involved in the development of a religious legal system.