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Palestinian scholar

The ACRPS weekly seminar on 16 November, 2016 hosted Palestinian scholar Lena Salaymeh at Tel Aviv University to discuss her recent English language book The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Salaymeh's research interests cover Islamic jurisprudence, particularly in comparison with Jewish religious law.

Salaymeh's talk provided the audience with a new, fundamentally different understanding of the sources of Islamic law in antiquity. Specifically, Salaymeh's project call for a re-reading of medieval Islamic legal texts in line with their historical context and to critique them from within their own temporal environment. According to Salaymeh, present-day orientalist criticisms of Islamic legal texts are rooted in a narrow interpretation of these texts which sought to evaluate them in light of contemporary values. Salaymeh also offered a history of the development and growth of Islamic Fiqh during the middle ages which, she said, are unfairly discarded for being "unreliable" by modern scholars, but this leaves open the question of which sources for Islamic law are to be trusted.

Salaymeh also pointed out that even as modern scholars criticized the verification methods employed by medieval Islamic theologians as unreliable, even present-day historians of Islamic jurisprudence were not free of bias and the constraints of their own points of view. This led to what Salaymeh termed the "subalternization" of Islamic historical works for being too rooted in their own cultures; borrowing from existing theories, Salaymeh claimed that this was not a question of purely criticizing medieval Islamic sources, but of "colonizing" the Islamic canon. Said the speaker, orientalist criticisms of Islamic sources, regardless of the type of source under question, all had one thing in common: they all sought to silence and dominate Islamic voice.

Salaymeh's talk was followed by a discussion with Moataz Al Khatib, Professor of Methodology and Ethics at the Qatar Faculty for Islamic Studies (Hamad Bin Khalifa University). Khatib offered his own assessment of the traditional orientalist critiques of medieval Islamic sources, and especially of the earliest recorded sources for Islamic law. This, he said, was a particularly important point given the bias of the very earliest Muslim communities in favor of oral over written sources.