Doubt in Islamic Law

Intisar A. Rabb is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the director of its Islamic Legal Studies Program. She also holds an appointment as a Professor of History and as Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Massachusetts.

• Introduction; Part I. Institutional Structures and Doubt, Seventh–Sixteenth Century CE: 1. The God of severity and lenity; 2. The rise of doubt; Part II. Morality and Social Context, Eighth–Eleventh Century CE: 3. Hierarchy and hudud laws, eighth–ninth century CE; 4. Doubt as moral discomfort, tenth–eleventh century CE; Part III. The Jurisprudence of Doubt, Eighth–Sixteenth Century CE: 5. Doubt as an element of Islamic criminal law, eighth–eleventh century CE; 6. Substantive, procedural, and interpretive doubt, eleventh–sixteenth century CE; 7. Strict textualism as a limitation on doubt: Sunni opponents, eighth–eleventh century CE; 8. Dueling theories of delegation and interpretation: Shi'i doubt, tenth–sixteenth century CE; Conclusion: doubt in comparative and contemporary context.

'In her extremely detailed book, Intisar A. Rabb traces the formation of the legal maxim of doubt in Islamic criminal law from the seventh until the eleventh century (CE) within both the Sunni and Shi'i legal traditions … Rabb's book offers an important contribution to the study of Islamic law. She has shown how the Muslim legal elite, even the eponymous Sunni jurists and their immediate successors, were individual human agents with a pragmatic bent, and as such their juridical thinking was shaped by complex and diverse goals such that they never arrived at a uniform definition of doubt. Neither did they limit themselves to a specific canon of 'texts' in order to develop an increasingly sophisticated jurisprudence of doubt by the eleventh century.' Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World Review