 حسناً، بسم الله لقد لم يكن لدينا كثير من المشاهدين يأتي لتأكد من شخص أحد من المساعدة في مجموعة مجموعة المساعدة الإسلامية رائعاً وصعباً هذا هو أفضل المجموعة التي لدينا أكثر من مجموعة المساعدة أسرع، براي جنوسان براون جانوسان براون is a very special speaker ليس فقط مستخدمة ولكنه يتجاه من مصر من المشاهد أن أمر you yourself testify that he is truly a distinguished speaker لديك كبير سعيد تفقد بأن أس Finally I am introducing him to you to talk about his chosen subject of is there justice outside of God's law making sense of the boundaries of the شريعة and Islamic civilization Professor Braun is clearly very skillful Man in selecting the titles of his subjects and formulating them لكي يجعلهم أصدقائي وكذلك مجدداً إذا أقوم بإمكانك بأسرع من المشاهداته سترى هذا لذا هناك مجدداً مجدداً هل أنت بسرع؟ هل أنت بسرع؟ هل الإسلام بسرع بفهم أو ليس؟ مجدداً وكذلك إذا لم يكن صحيح، إنه صحيح وكذلك مجدداً وكذلك مجدداً أو ليس؟ مجدداً لذا لدينا هناك مجدداً who knows very well how to attract his audience now مجدداً جنسون برون since 19 since 2010 he has held the Prince Al-Walid Bin Talal chair for the for Islamic chair of Islamic civilization in Georgetown University in Washington DC and since I don't know the people what mixed while I was having my my cake I had the mix while I was having my cake yes since 2015 he has been the director of the Prince Al-Walid Bin Talal again center for the Muslim Christian understanding although he is quite young he is definitely younger than me though he is still quite young he has an impressive list of publications including five books four books I will just give you the titles of one or two of them you have miss quoting Muhammad this is one book this is one world one world publication 2014 and then Muhammad a very short introduction Oxford University Press 2010 حديث Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world one world 2009 and then canonization of Bukhari and Muslim canonization of Bukhari and Muslim if I can get my Muslim in addition to these books he has written eight articles I have already mentioned the title of some of them he uses eight languages eight languages you have Arabic South Arabian you have Turkish and Persian this is from the Islamic side beginner Turkish it says on my CV beginner then you have Latin French English and German reading knowledge and judging by his young age we can expect that more will be added to this list he is the editor of the Oxford encyclopedia for Islam for Islamic Islam and law I think Oxford encyclopedia for Islam and law his specialization is the حديث and law that's important you see حديث it's very important for Islamic law there are so many people who come to study Quran or write about the Quran like the field of Quranic studies is already crowded but حديث is different حديث is an exacting science it requires the exactitude of vigorous scholars and Jonathan Brown is one of these I am really pleased that he chose to write about حديث and Islamic law but you have not come here to listen to me and you came to listen to him so I hand you over to him Thank you بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم بحمد الله وصالاته وسلم وصحب الجمعين Thank you very much for inviting me ف. عبدالحليم ف. موستف الشا who helped arrange the trip and invited me to the whole School of Oriental African Studies for extending the invitation you for coming and I want to say that it's really a huge honor to be invited to present in this lecture series I always assign my students ف. عبدالحليم's translation of the Quran and so now I'm getting a chance to meet them in person and receive compliments to which I can only say that I'm one classical Arabic poet said we're just worms crawling on the roots of the great scholars who came before me and I feel like just a little person amongst the great group of scholars who are alive today and how I ever got any attention beyond me but I'll do my best with that attention to be of service to God and to the most community to the world community as much as I can this issue that we're talking about is something that is you know on camera I think it's on the minds of Muslims very much and everything I study oh by the way all those articles have subtitles yeah and the first part is weird but then you have these very clear subtitles so I just want to specify that you notice my red white and blue tie tomorrow I have to go vote in my state primary everything I do and everything I study is really about my own interests questions I have as a Muslim as American and so I try to answer those questions for myself and if they are useful to other people then I hope that my answer has helped them as well and I do my best and I could be wrong so I am open to correction this question is I'm not going to answer it I will lead to the answer I think in my talk but maybe in the questions I can answer it I just realized I don't know if I give a clear enough answer I'll do my best okay I want to start with a story and it's a story involving the Sultan Nuruddin Zengi the great founder of the a Yubid dynasty of Syria and eventually of Egypt and Nuruddin Zengi he conquered the city of Mosul and soon after that Mosul was afflicted by a serious wave of thefts crime wave theft wave and the the judges Muslim judges are also scholars so I'll say Ulama judges the Muslim judges wrote a letter to Nuruddin Zengi saying please they said this problem يحتاج إلى نوع سياسة of one يحتاج إلى نوع سياسة this requires some type of سياسة سياسة meaning a lot of times it's politics but actually especially when Muslim legal scholars talk about it it means executive authority it means the executive authority of the ruler the person who has the muscle in some ways you could think of سياسة as in Latin Imperium the ability to make commands and demand obedience and punish for disobedience Muslim judges they're just judges they don't have any muscle they require the help of the state to implement rulers they said this requires a type of سياسة and he wrote back and he said I will not help you I'm paraphrasing I will not help you because if God had wanted if God had wanted in his Sharia if God had wanted the Sharia the law of God if he had wanted this to include a solution to the problem you're facing he would have put it there it's not there therefore I will not I will have you support her support her support her and help her and help her and help her I will help you help her understand And we are selling come in This is مرحباً بين العقل العالية وعلى المرحب العالية كما تفضل في المرحب القرآن ومرحب المحمد بين العقل العالية ومرحب المرحب ومرحب المرحب مرحباً بين العقل العالية ومرحب المرحب أو المرحب العالية ماذا تفعل when these don't seem to match up هذا يبدو to be precisely what was happening في المرحب العالية في المرحب المرحب العالية They said, we need Siasa We need you to solve this problem He said, this is not part of God's law And so the injustice you are suffering Has no response That, of course, you can imagine Generated a good amount of anxiety On the part of the people of Mosul And it generates anxiety At least it did when I first read this today In a way, this is a correction In this book, I actually made a big boo-boo So until I can get a second edition I'm going to correct it for you first Which is, I said I treated this as an accurate understanding In fact, as you'll see Nouradine was actually making a big mistake Nouradine Zengie was grotesquely in the wrong On this point Why is that? Well, sorry I should have had this point up This is a crisis of justice That they're experiencing Because The olama, the scholars of Mosul are saying People have What's called hukuk Hukuk in Arabic is rights Rights, singular huk, plural hukuk They have rights They have rights to security They have rights to property They have the right to public order These rights are not being preserved And what Nouradine Zengie said is That is not part of God's law He did not provide an answer for this For this problem And I won't act In fact Nouradine Zengie was completely wrong Really, totally I feel bad criticizing the dead But there's a good lesson that comes from it He was totally wrong And God knows how many people had their Little sacks of coins Or camels Or pots of rice stolen Because he didn't act In fact There is in the writings Of Muslim legal scholars And the earliest I've seen them Articulate this is in the Ten hundreds of the common era The writing of Awood Hassan and Al-Wardi Famous Shafi judge of Baghdad Died 1058 of the common era But there's mentions of it earlier And it's implicit In many of the Hadiths of the Prophet But not as It only becomes an institution Really in the 800s As far as I know Could be earlier But as far as I know It only becomes an institution In the 800s of the common era During the Abbasid caliphate Its capital was in Baghdad What Al-Mawadzi and others Called Wilayet Al-Jaraim Jaraim is plural It means crimes Plural of Jareema Crime This is We could call it a crimes court But this isn't a court For any crime This isn't a court For parking Or as my friend Just got hit Isbo Is it violation Of public order or something He has a Ferrari And he was revving it too loud He got this fine That's not the kind of crime You're going to go To the Jaraim court This is serious crimes In particular And this goes back To a Quranic verse The verse in the Quran Heraba Which is often translated As banditry Highway robbery Not the kind of thing You experience from In America Like cable TV companies Engage in highway robbery This is real highway robbery Especially in the Maliki School of Law First degree Premeditated Cold blooded murder Almost assassination These are the type of things That The Jaraim court handles And the Quran Lays the seeds for this The Quran says إنما جزاء لذين يحاربون الله ورسوله ويسعون في الأرض فسادا And you قتلوا أو you صلبوا أو تقطعوا ايديهم أو رجلهم من خلاف If I remember the verse correctly The punishment Of those people Who make war Same root as The banditry Who make war on God And his prophet And spread corruption in the land Their reward is not but That they be killed And they be crucified And they have their hands And feet cut off On opposite directions And this is Verses revealed in the context Of the life of the prophet Muhammad When a group of people come From a tribe called the Orayna tribe And they're sick I'm not going to get into this issue Because it's going to raise Too many questions And involves camel urine And medicine I'll just skip over that They're supposed to go And access these camels Instead They kill the shepherds And they steal the camels So they've committed murder Premeditated murder And they've stolen goods They're captured They're brought to the prophet And he has their eyes put out And they're executed And there's no evidence There's not any reliable evidence Even according to Classical Muslim scholars That they had their hands cut off But they were executed This becomes The Quranic And prophetic Basis For the criminal court The Walayt al-Jara'im You note that By the way The Quran is verse 533 There is no ceiling On the punishment That you can receive In the sense that you can be Executed As we'll discuss There is a question Of whether or not Certain kinds of executioner Certain kinds of treatment At the hands of the court Can be excessively cruel And that is one of the areas Of tension That exists in this Story of anxiety This was An expression Of siyasa On the part of the prophet And when later Muslim scholars Point to prophetic justification For the criminal crimes court For the crimes court They point to this incident Because it's not seen as Something that is within The purview of the qadi Of the judge Muslim judges In every school of law Except the Maliki school of law And in the schools of law That predominated in Central Middle East South Asia Central Asia The Ottoman Empire Southeast Asia It was The ulema judges said These crimes are beyond our means Like these crimes are brought To the prophet And he dealt with them Uniquely With unique punishments This is the job of the ruler This falls under the siyasa Of the ruler It is your job To deal with it So Ibn Taymiyyah The famous scholar of Damascus Died in 1328 Talks about this In his time He calls it the war court The military court But it's the same thing As the judaim court This is where cases are taken That would normally fall under the qadi The judge's subject matter Of jurisdiction But if they're so serious That the qadi can't solve it Like the qadi doesn't have The means to go out And stop these people who are Engaging in higher robbery In the city So the troops Doesn't have police And also Sometimes if there's not enough evidence The This is something we'll deal with Later as well Which is In order to prove Someone's guilty of murder In Islamic law You need two Upstanding male witnesses You need two Upstanding male witnesses Let's say What's your name? I know you Okay It came out Let's Do you meet me in Malaysia? Oh my gosh Small world Okay Let's say He kills somebody God forbid Okay And the only people Who see him Are a woman And a 15 year old kid A 14 year old boy We do not have enough evidence To prove that he did it These people are not acceptable In evidence for murder trials In Islamic law But In another instance In the life of the Prophet There is a person who is murdered And the body is found In one of the Jewish towns In the Hejaz One of the Muslims is murdered They don't know who did it There's a procedure Of oath swearing That I won't get into But basically If people swear A number of oaths That these people killed Somebody killed these people In this neighborhood We don't know who Or we don't have enough evidence To prove who it is But we think we know who it is And the people Who are named as responsible parties They can't be executed Which would be a normal punishment But they do have to pay The blood money for the person Who is killed So what happens is If you don't That is also done Under the rubric of Siassa This is the Siassa of the ruler He handles this So for example If This becomes the precedent For numerous cases Let's say Someone is murdered In What's the biggest mosque In London Region's park mosque Someone's murdered in the mosque Or right at the entrance To the mosque No one knows who did it The ruler The ruler has to pay He's responsible Or the state is responsible They take on a corporate responsibility Because what happens In the instance Where this man is murdered In Haibar Or in this Jewish town The Prophet himself Pays the The compensation Because there's not even enough evidence To prove that The people who were accused Are guilty So he himself paid The second thing The second story of anxiety That I will tell you Involves A scholar From Outside Shiraz In southern Iran He's the last Great Sunni scholar of Iran He died right on the verge Of the expansion Of the Safavid dynasty That conquered all of Iran What's now historically Iran And in fact more than Iran And converted In a country to Shi'ism Before that You had a majority of the Sunni population Jalal ad-Din Davani Of Shiraz Leading Shaffi Scholar of law Ashreed theologian And a Intimate courtier Of the Aqqu Yunlu Turkic dynasty Which ruled Parts of Iran And Iraq at the same time The Aqqu Yunlu The White sheep White sheep Nomads These were really Your You know Your Turkic warlord Your big gruff Giant lamb leg Eating Not showering a lot Not so sophisticated Turkic warlord They ruled southern Iran And he was A loyal servant of the dynasty He writes A very interesting treatise This treatise is in Persian And this book that I'm Writing now Part of it is Editing that text And translating it He writes a treatise On something called مظالم Or مزالم For you South Asian friends of mine مزالم Or Persian friends of mine Or Egyptian friends of mine مزالم مزالم Means wrong Or grievances The مزالم is You can translate it as A tribunal of wrongs A tribunal of grievances This goes back To The ancient Near East The idea that The ruler Whether it's the Roman emperor Or the Persian emperor Is the ruler Who is the ultimate guarantor Of justice in the land Is the ruler Who must make sure That justice is done For his subjects You can also see this It's easy to imagine The Arab tradition Let's say No mad in Pre-Islamic Arabia Someone Even today Let's say inside Arabia If you have They actually have A مزالم court inside Arabia And you can go Ultimately In theory all the way To the king And say This isn't just I'm not talking about inside Or anywhere This is One of your Tax collectors took too much Money from me One of your Soldiers came And ran over my sheep With his horse Or this judge Ruled on my case And the ruling was unfair Or What happens later on Is it's also conflated With things like The crimes court So for Davani The madallam court Is also the crimes court It's a place Where siyasa happens It's a place where the ruler Or wherever the ruler's representative is Can give you justice What's the difference Between A madallam court And a jirayim Or a crimes court And the regular court Of a muslim judge The qadi court What's the difference The difference is that For example The muslim judge For the most part And there's a lot of debate about this But for the most part And at least in the understanding Of people like Davani and others The muslim judge Has to rule by his own school of law So if he's a shafi He has to rule by the shafi school If he's a maliki He has to rule by the maliki school If he's a hanafi He has to rule by the hanafi school The judge Has restrictions on him That prevents him from Pursuing his own agendas So For many muslim schools of law The judge cannot rule Based on his own knowledge So let's say Ikmal To use you again I see Ikmal outside And he has got A gigantic bottle of beefy Or gin And he's just chugging it God forbid Ikmal would never do that I'm the judge Someone brings Ikmal To the court And says Ikmal has been Breaking intoxicants But we don't have Any witnesses Only one witness It's insufficient I saw him do it In my own eyes According to many schools of law In Islam I cannot rule I can't rule against it Why? Because the fear is that What's to stop me From just saying Omar Omar gave me this nice book He's a very nice young man But It's not quite nice enough Because there wasn't A big fat lot Of pound notes in here So I bring him Into my court and say I saw you do this I'm going to convict you of a crime So these restrictions Are placed on The judge To prevent him From using his power To protect the rights Of the innocent Or the wrongly accused Sometimes That means that people Who are accused And in fact are guilty Might not be Convicted in the Qadi's court Because those restrictions Prevent the Qadi From Ruling For our conviction So for example The scholar Mawardi I told you about The 11th century Shafi Judge And Baghdad He had a very Strict And it wasn't just His school of law But he really was Very formalistic In his rules of evidence So he really stuck To the formal rules Not the Let's say Spirit of the law So If you have Two Upstanding Male witnesses To something That is evidence If the opponent The defendant Let's say Does not have Two upstanding Male witnesses The people with Two upstanding Male witnesses Win He's in a debate With people from The Maliki school of law They say If you have 100 witnesses All of them Upstanding Reliable people On one side And two witnesses On the other side Obviously the 100 people Two people I mean Everybody would know That You would sit there And be like Obviously they're Telling the truth Mawardi says No Two people I don't care What makes your heart Feel more rest With ones out of the other What's more convincing to you These are the rules From God People in The Maliki School said If there's a dispute Between a married couple And they want to get Divorced The husband says We never consummated The marriage We never had sex That means he only Has to pay Half the dowry back He only has to give her Half the dowry Doesn't have to pay The full dowry They have sex They have to pay The full dowry There are words There's no witnesses At least we hope not There's no witnesses In the Shafi school The assumption Again, sort of Formalistic We know for sure Before the marriage They hadn't had sex And we have no evidence To prove that they had sex Therefore The default is To what happened before The man Only always half The dowry The Maliki People from The Maliki School arguing with Mawardi said That's absolute nonsense These couples Everybody knows That people do when they're married The safest assumption Is that they had sex It's unfair You're robbing this woman Of her rights If you don't Go on the assumption That they had sex Again, Mawardi says We have the rules of evidence They're very clear What you think makes sense Doesn't matter Devani says something Very interesting In this treatise This Persian treatise He writes This little treatise Is describing this Institution of the Mazzalam Court And he tells a story He says it's a Prophetic example In life of the Prophet Which is The Prophet's A Muslim named Zubair Rebn Al Awam Comes to the Prophet And he's having dispute With a man who owns land Right next to him Far on land right next to him They're disputing about Who gets water Sharing the water The Prophet says Okay, Zubair Enough water And a certain amount of water And then let it go To this guy And the man says Oh, Prophet of God You're ruling on his behalf Because he's your cousin Yeah, he's one of your cousins One of your relatives The Prophet gets angry And he says Now take twice as much water That was executive decision The man had Spoken disrespectfully To the Prophet of God Which by the way Normally would have been This person would have apostasized So this is actually An example of the Prophet He doesn't ever punish people Around him Even when they do acts That today would be Really horrible I mean, people would be So angry If someone said that today He just made Deprive the person Of a little bit of water He acted as sort of Like a judge today Giving fines of contempt Or giving a lawyer Disrespectful lawyer Disrespectful party And the suit A contempt of court charge And then he says Anybody who says Devani says this Sorry, Devani says Anybody who says That The Madhalam court Is not legitimate Naamashua Has said something Illegitimate In fact What they have said Is Kuffar It's disbelief They have said something That's like Saying God doesn't exist They have engaged in disbelief By saying this Because the prophet He says The prophet of God himself Engaged in this Ciasa Of hearing wrongs And dealing with people As he did in the case Of Zubair And his disputant What is What is going on Behind this Why is Devani Defending The Madhalam court And why is he saying That if you say This is illegitimate You've actually Said something That's Beyond heresy It's actually disbelief I'll explain to you What I think the reasons are And it's the same reason Or similar reason To why Nuruddin Zangi Misunderstood What his duties His Sharia duties Were as Ruhr When people talk about The Sharia The Muslims talk about The Sharia Oftentimes they're thinking about The Qadi's law The Qadi is the judge The Muslim judge The normal Muslim judge The Qadi's law The Qadi's law The Qadi's law is Elaborated in this Giant discourse called Fiqh Or Islamic law The Substance of Islamic law The stuff of Islamic law All the rules All the discussions All the debates All the schools of law And this is often What people think of This is what people think Of a Sharia This is a Sharia If you go to a book Of Islamic law This is what you'll find In the book of Islamic law You won't find Madalim In the book of Islamic law A lot of times You won't find Jiraim In the book of Islamic law You'll find the law The Qadi deals with But That's not the only Manifestation of the Sharia There's all these other Areas as well One of them is called Hisba Hisba is basically Market Public order policing Or public morality policing It's really Especially Market policing A scholar Who's a point To go around And basically Make sure everybody's Not selling You know Flower instead of Baby formula Not selling Like in Egypt Batteries that last For exactly 10 seconds Actually batteries That last For whatever A week Sorry Egyptian people And My other show says They have a Hasslat Leafy Masr So the Market police Making sure everybody's Trading fairly And if someone's got You know A really loud Oud concert going on In their house Or something Or in the shop He breaks up The little party Says this is inappropriate In theory If people are selling You know Paintings Or statues That they're not allowed To have Omar you once told me About that great book I'm I get Credit here On this issue جراء And we already talked about مزال And we already talked about Taxes and the army ألم Muslim scholars Muslim legal scholars Always acknowledged That things like Taxation And the Organization of the army This is all The ruler's job This is all سياسة Muslim scholars Have no Impact As long as The ruler isn't Putting That As long as It's not exorbitant Then This is the job Of the ruler Also this Today things like Traffic signs Speed limits Administrative law This would all fall Under This category Things that ألم always said This is the job Of the ruler Now That doesn't mean That there's No thick On these things There is The rules Of Hezba come From This So The fact that Let's say Producing Little statues Of Pharaoh And selling them In the Khalili This would be Technically Against Islamic law Because Muslims aren't supposed To manufacture And Buy and sell Statues Right So in theory The Person doing Hezba Would say Okay His statue's Got to go Sorry The And They also Have a little bit Of A small layer Of Because People have Basic rights They have Their basic Hakouk In the Sharia So I said Before that In the Madalim court In the Jiraim court The crimes court The judge Isn't constrained By Medhebs You can go Pick whatever Medheb They can Pick And choose From different Medhebs Based on What is best What they Think is best So In The Let's say The Maliki school of law You have much more Flexibility On Judging Who is a reliable Witness Which Side Which Side in dispute Has more Compelling evidence So the Judge But You can't do something That is unacceptable In all the schools of law I can't just You can't just bring somebody in Somebody says This guy Stole my car I said okay I'm going to have you beaten And take $50 from you Or I'm going to Take your car And give it to this guy You can't just do that You have to have some evidence People have a basic Right to property They have a basic right To do process So there are basic Rights that are preserved And these rights are Made by The Muslim jurists In the same Fikr discourse That you see That makes up The Qadi's law But Jurists don't talk about You know What level of taxation Is okay Sometimes they do But in general They would say That the ruler Is the ruler's Perrogative They don't talk about How the army Should be run This is the ruler's Perrogative If Someone says That Let's say I want to exchange A large number Of Christian prisoners That I have For a small number Of Muslim prisoners Yeah I went and asked His scholars And they said This is acceptable This is acceptable Within the different schools Of law Someone thinks This is okay So you can do this So there's still Some reference To Fikr But it's generally Up to the Tremendous amount Of discretion To the ruler Now But As I've said before Often times when people Think about Sharia They think about What you find In a book of Fikr Or Islamic law And you don't Find any of this stuff No Jirai No Madalim No taxation Very little Hezba Things where you Find in a book of Fikr But In reality This is the Sharia And this is what Devani was saying If you say That Madalim Is not the Sharia You have Made a mistake Because Without the Jirai And without the Madalim And without the Hezba We cannot protect The rights of people The people in Mosul Had a right to be Safe from thieves Because the Sharia Guarantees the right of property Some of the examples That Devani gives In his treatise That he saw When he was in charge Of the Madalim courts In Shiraz Were people who had been Murdered And there was no witnesses They find A body And they think They suspect Somebody did it But they They can't do anything About it So they brought The people in And they Interrogated them And they confessed These things You couldn't do In a normal Caught court People who are Murdered Their families Have a right For justice And if you Don't accept These other parts As part of the Sharia You don't accept Shiasa You are robbing Shiasa Which is that People think That this Is the Sharia Whereas in reality This is the Sharia Why might there be So much anxiety I just gave you One example Which is people Have a misunderstanding Of the nature of the Sharia But that's not What's happening With people like Nouradine Zenghi And Devani In his very serious Statements This is more Going on Than just this misunderstanding One After the After 1250 When the Mongols Invade Middle East 1258 They sacked Baghdad And from that point on Well first you have The Ilkhanid Mongol Dynasty Then it breaks up And you have things like You have the Dynasty of Tamerlane There's also a Mongol Dynasty And you have the Akkoyunlu And then the Ottomans Are also a Turkic Dynasty From that point on The legacy Of the Mongols Is part of The Muslim world At least the eastern What is that legacy Before the Mongols came There was no Muslim ruler Who felt that he had Some justification to rule That went beyond The will of Allah The Muslim conception of God And the Sharia The Mongols originally They converted to Islam After the late 1200s The early 1300s The Mongols who ruled The Muslim world All became Muslim But they Didn't conquer the Middle East Because of Islam They conquered the Middle East Because of the Great Sky God Who had given The right of Universal Empire To the Golden Family Of Genghis Khan And it was descent From Genghis Khan The Dynasty of Genghis Khan That had its own power Its own legitimacy Never before had this been seen In the Muslim world An alternative notion Of legitimacy Outside Totally outside of Islam And even after They became Muslim For example Tamerlane Everybody knows of him Died 1405 The undefeated Many time Oscar winner of Turquid Conqueror of the Year Awards Undefeated Conquered India Central Asia Defeated the Ottomans Everybody His His descendants Even though he was Technically Muslim As a Central Muslim They didn't rule by the Sharia They ruled by what's called The Torah Not the Jewish Torah Torah is His Family's version Of the Mongol law And it was applied In what's called Yorahu Courts Don't worry about How you spell that They applied Mongol law It didn't have Almost no rules For witnesses Almost no rules of evidence You could have people Executed on the spot No due process Immediate seizure Of property And it was only Under the son Of Tamerlane A guy named Shah Rukh Not the famous actor But that's who He's named after Shah Rukh Who In 1411 He abolishes These Yorahu Courts And he says Only the Sharia Will rule Will only rule by the Sharia But there's this incredible Anxiety amongst Muslim scholars From that point on And this Mongol Turkic Mongol legacy Goes all the way Into the Mamluk realm Of Egypt and Syria And this huge Anxiety That Muslim scholars Have about the idea That people Even if they're Muslim Are actually Rule with some other notion Of law Some other notion Of law outside of Islam To the extent That they say Some one Muslim scholar Al-Makrizi In the 1400 Says inaccurately That the word Siyasa Actually comes from The Mongol word Yasa Which is the law Of Genghis Khan It's not true It comes from Saes Yassusa Which is the person Who leads the horse That the groom Of the horse To lead somebody But correct right So Okay I hope it is He's not going to embarrass me But it's not from Yassa It's not from the Mongol law But there's this Tremendous anxiety That Siyasa is really This creeping Mongol law That's coming in So there's great suspicion Of it So when someone Like Devani saying If you say Siyasa is illegitimate You've said something terrible He's responding To all those people All those Muslim scholars Who are suspicious The ruler Using executive authority To resolve Situations of injustice There's also Abuse Of Siyasa And the Mamluk rulers Of Egypt and Syria The Mamluk dynasty Goes from around 1260 To 1517 Egypt and Syria These people They were basically Turkish Or Circassian Turks taken as Young boys Trained as warriors In Cairo As slaves And they're freed And they become The bodyguards of the ruler Eventually they just take over And they become their own Self-reproducing Dynasty of slave Soldier bodyguards It's like You know A bunch of bouncers Taking over Kicking out the Whatever Beyonce Saying you're not here anymore We're running the show And they just Same attitude These people were Very violent A lot of the time Standard punishment If you really didn't like Somebody Cut them in half Stick the top body On a pile of lime And then Precisely They took it back 거. What happened I have no idea How they got tied And the Lot of muub And nothing I know They're With that And others Are Better لذلك يوجد أفضل ربطة جيدة لأن بعض المسلمين يجب أن يستخدمونها يجب أن يدفعون الناس من الشرية حكوك ماذا يجب أن نتحدث عن كل هذا؟ هل هذا المتحدة التي نتحدث عنها في البداية؟ المتحدة بين المسلمين المتحدة بأن هناك بعض المسلمين ون this case is a judicial system that has been defined by the Quran the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad the scholarship of Muslim judges and Muslim jurists so Muslims are tremendously invested in this rule of law they believe it originates with God certainly it's shaped by human minds in its details but it originates with God as Nuruddin Zangi said if God had wanted there to be a legal solution to this in the Sharia he would have given us one of course he was wrong, there was one, he just didn't think about it but that same, think about the example of Muwardi when Muwardi says it doesn't matter a thousand witnesses are the same as two it doesn't matter if you think that's unjust these are the rules God's given us there is a tension between the rule of law and notions of equity or justice that are outside, maybe deep down something seems wrong to you those Maliki scholars they knew it seemed totally unacceptable that a thousand people are equal to two people what are these what is this thing that starts forms a lump in your throat or something what is this notion of justice that you feel uneasy with the rule of law as defined in the scriptures of Islam where does it come from part of it is just your local culture so for example people in Europe think it's something wrong with women wearing headscarfs putting headscarfs on their head why? it's just a piece of cloth other parts of the world people think it's weird not to have a headscarf on your head Americans think it's weird if you go to the beach women go to the beach and take their tops off American teenage boys like it but Americans think it's weird French people go to the beach and take their tops off Americans think it's insane to eat dog meat people in China don't think there's a problem eating dog meat there's some notions of justice that are just differences in culture let's not talk about that what else is going on there's this notion of عدل in Islam in Arabic عدل is evenness, equity عدل is when the two halves of the camel load are equal things are fair there's notion of what's called أسلح what is best in the best interest or for the good of somebody this is also the word مسلحة so for example what is the difference between the judge and the qadi the qadi judge can rule can pick from whatever school of law he wants in order to get the أسلح result in order to get the best interest result maximize the good but qadi in theory can't do that just like you know now in America we have this great TV show on the OJ Simpson trial you guys know about OJ Simpson right the juice anyway recreating it I was in boarding school without a TV at the time so I missed it all and what's the big what's behind the OJ case everybody knows he did it but he wasn't convicted justice it was not done or according to the African American community black people had been suffering for too long at the hands of the LAP and it was about time that one of them got away with it just like all the white people get away with it justice was not done on both sides we can see this all the time in movies when the system fails you have to stick by the rules of the system but sometimes the system fails that's the madallam court can rectify that situation all of these things one of them is called تخير when the judge can pick between different scores of law درورة is necessity if you have تخير ability to pick between scores of law and necessity in Islamic law allows you to do things that are otherwise prohibited if you take these two licenses what the madallam judge can do you can get you can achieve a level of flexibility that allows you to supersede the normal restraints on the judge and achieve justice as a result that's the function of the madallam court and the jara'im court yeah I know I'm almost out of time I just wanted to to briefly discuss sorry one more thing so what are the possible responses we've seen that Muslim scholars had to this tension between rule of law in scripture and sentences of justice or justice of equity outside of scripture one of them was to respond as مواردي did that say look your sense of justice doesn't mean anything I know you think this is unfair but these are the formal rules that govern the judge's behavior these are what we follow formalism must, if God had wanted us to have different rules of evidence he would have given us different rules of evidence so that's one response that's a very small minority response another response is it's the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law that matters it's function not form that must be supreme so a great scholar in the mid-1300s named Ibn Khayyim al-Jawziah died 1351 he wrote an entire big fat book one purpose is to say that wherever there is justice there is the sharia, there is God's law and if you are not giving justice you are failing in your sharia duty if you have some violent criminal and there is not enough evidence to convict him and you let him go and he goes and commits more crimes you have not done God's will so remember I said that if I don't know I can't rule by my knowledge even if I see Ibn Khayyim al-Jawziah says that's nonsense the judge can rule by his knowledge if he knows something is true he can immediately rule finally and this is the option that was most often taken in Islamic civilization a negotiated compromise one would be that you relax the rules temporarily this is done for example after the 1300s in the Maliki school of law in the Hanafi school of law which is you say let's say normally we only accept upstanding witnesses with good characters it's very hard to be an upstanding witness in Islamic law you have to pray your extra prayers not only get to pray all the five daily prayers regularly you're not an upstanding witness you're never going to get no one's going to get married no one's going to get committed because the conditions of our time have been so deteriorated from the past we will drop these requirements this is necessity and this allows us to do this we have to do this to maintain justice the other one is you create alternative venues like the Madalim court where these rules are relaxed and it's the ruler's executive authority that makes the decision to guarantee justice thanks very much exactly 45 minutes very good eloquent American speaker managed brought you all here at this end of the day hour and kept you captivated for a full hour yes it was man I really maybe my watch was slower he made you laugh a number of times this is the best a speaker can do I also do weddings and bar mitzvahs thank you very much for this he has kindly agreed to answer some questions we cannot we cannot have this evening we will only have a few and I invite question please be brief and to the point why is this about my personal life it's not interesting anymore because there's this very famous Indian composer he was born and then he converted to Islam and then he adopted Sufism and his songs like all over the world he went and he won of course Grammy and Oscar they bring the kind of this equity and peace to the mind which you're talking about within the whole of Islam which he actually advocates that's one point I'm going down to secondly as a student of Islam on human rights our professor that either we can adopt a harmonistic approach or we can adopt a contrary in approach a harmonistic approach yes that everything you see in a perspective and it falls like something which you have done this was one of the best I would say a class of understanding all throughout like six months since right now so thank you so much the question which was just I understand the questions I think one, Sufism is great I like Kuala as much as the next guy but you can't run a country with Sufism or well actually the Safavids did but I mean it doesn't work very you know you have to have people that have courts you got to bring people who would park their car legally you got to do something about it right so Sufism is wonderful but it's not a profession I mean it's not a legal although there's all sorts of fascinating questions in the intersection between mysticism and law for example what happens if I mystically transported by God to Mecca I come back but I five minutes late for my class or what happens if someone dies God brings them back to life but their inheritance has already been their state has already been distributed violations of the miracles not influence law miracles can happen according to Muslims but they have no legal weight sorry you were miraculously transported to Mecca but you were five minutes late to class you get penalized your state is you died legally your state got distributed sorry okay the second question about human rights and I think it's an interesting question because I talked so much about Haqq and that's the translation of human rights again there's a big difference because in the Sharia the Quran doesn't say what these Haqq are these rights are the Sunnah the Prophet does not say what these rights are these are abstracted inducted by Muslim scholars over the first three or four centuries of Islamic law and until you get really articulate discrete discussions of this in the ten hundreds of the common era as early as I've seen it but maybe there's earlier I'm happy to be corrected and they talk about the five things that have to be protected in the Sharia right to property right to life right to reason right to religion right to family these are different from what we would think about right to religion doesn't necessarily doesn't mean you can get up and say as a Muslim get up and say Islam is a terrible religion that is not going to be good it's not going to be allowed by Muslim scholars doesn't mean total freedom of religion what it means is religion has to be protected in this case Islam has to be protected against of the heresy and things like that but also Jewish people who are living under Muslim law Christian people under Muslim law they have right their religions are also protected Muslim scholars have to protect them Muslim rulers have to protect them the difference between this and human rights is that these are not expandable infinitely so for example people a lot of people today believe that the right to engage in relationships sexual relationships or marital relationships with people of the same sex it should be a human right and regimes where states that don't allow that should be seen as in violation of human rights most Muslim scholars would not accept that as a human right there could come a time when free refills at restaurants is a right is a human right in theory someone could say this is a human right and if everybody agrees this is a human right then countries that don't provide free refills at restaurants would be violation of human rights so the point is that for Muslims this list is not infinitely expandable and it's not subject to democratic or consensus building there's a set number of rights that come from the revelations and those are the rights that Muslim scholars are now I'm sure they could shoehorn some rights under some of these rights creatively yeah yes go ahead grief my answer is too long I'm going to be shorter Professor Brown when I was listening to your lecture I was thinking about the history of English law and in English law common law using the word common law in its strict sense when it was found that you couldn't get justice for certain purposes we developed the concept of equity but what then happened was that the rules of equity themselves were developed in enormous detail by English judges in the Muslim majority world the development of equitable principles outside what I would call doesn't seem to have gone the same way in terms of developing details procedures rules can you think of a reason why that might be this is a very good question it warms my heart because it's what I've been thinking about a lot so I mean first of all there's a debate I think amongst common law jurists about does do the maxims of equity originate in common law are they taken from ecclesiastic law are they taken from Roman law or if they come from common law and are simply rephrasing there's something like that or different applications that's different from let's say totally separate development of law body of law in the Islamic tradition you're totally right there is no metmothalim law what there is is flexibility within the existing pluralism of legal schools of law right so there's this sort of giant grab bag of law and instead of being restricted to one category one school of law you can take from any school of law so in effect you don't need to develop a new body of law because you have this massive legal heritage out there not just common law it's not like just the law of the people of England you have this massive body of law expand from Malaysia to north Africa conceivably that you could draw from and so that's why I think that it's more that you just have these principles of best interests pursuing the good protecting rights looking at necessity these will just guide you in the choices from this huge legacy it's a very good question thank you this young lady is that there is someone she maybe has the microphone okay I see so Anik thank you for your lecture there are a couple of questions I wanted to address to yourself firstly when you refer to formalism could you draw an analogy or a comparison between that formalism and the formalism that existed within England in terms of in the time of Jeremy Bentham when there was a whole concept of formalism as well how would you compare that to I mean you have like a really I mean just yeah and just secondly in terms of the second function which was functional when you mentioned scholars like Ibn al Qayyim etc was it their position because of his theological stance on تحسين تقبيح that was more or less he was trying to get to the underlying function but saying you have to be equally true to the letter and the spirit at the same time so these are two excellent questions when I talk about formalism so legal formalism when lawyers use the word formalism it's always a bad word formalists are people who don't think sophisticatedly enough about the issue not the way you want but you know formalism is important because if you don't have a consistent application of law it means people get treated everybody needs to know they're going to go to court and get treated the same as everyone else there needs to be predictable law otherwise companies don't know if they can sell cars to Iran because they don't know if they're going to get prosecuted so you need to have formalism for consistency and for predictability of results that's how one of the ways you measure rule of law is predictability of outcome but so I mean it's questionable we had it too so questionable formalism the time of Jeremy Bentham in the early 1800's things like you know if you have a tort claim between two individuals so I run into a professor who threw these car in the middle of nowhere there's no witnesses except both of us neither of us can be witnesses in the case because we're both interested parties we can't testify you can't have written evidence not that but you can't have written evidence in equity you had written evidence in equity people could be witnesses and so what happens in both the UK and the US as you know is that these two things get merged in the late 1800's and early 1900's and so now you have equity and law together the second question about which is a really good point so he says in his book he objects to formalism he objects to people who are not going to convict the violent criminal because they don't have enough evidence right he says whatever there is whatever there is justice there is the sharia of God there is the sharia of God now I could say that today we know it's unfair it is unjust for a daughter to receive half the share of her son as inheritance it is unjust for a gay couple not to have exactly the same rights as a straight couple I bet you you know you know you know I don't mean that but the problem is if you take if you take just that that model he starts out with and you apply it without constraints you'll get a completely conventional notion of justice that's not rooted in any revelatory constraints but it's just based on local custom and developing culture which a lot of people are fine with but I think the vast majority of Muslim scholars would say no there are certain basic restrictions that you have to follow but then you would ask him what happens if those basic the rules of evidence are not something that stupid Muslim scholars just come up with because they feel like having a busy day of writing these are in the Qur'an and the son of the prophet how much clearer can you get by what right do you overturn these so this is you also there's also formal constraints and then you're just drawing a line between them it was in the wrong but it was if you're going to disagree about where the line should be between these 2 Poles of Quickly because there was a period in time هل كان ذلك one of the factors why in the cases that you cited nor Dean think he might have taken a more kind of puritanical view as opposed to being more kind of adaptable and flexible in his outlook and then adapting to a new scenario based on the text that was already out there actually sorry bad question we have a bad question folks this is something that has been discussed a lot by scholars and Islamic studies history of Islamic law so this idea that there's a closing of the gate of which she had this comes from in the 1600s some Ottoman scholars say use this phrase and then it gets picked up later by western scholars and they assume that at a certain point Muslims just it's like they turned their brain off okay no more look first of all gunpowder didn't exist at the time of the Prophet and the duration world cell phones didn't exist Muslim scholars have been making rules about this stuff looking back so they're always doing what she had they're always doing interpretation but the difference is what they meant is that you don't have creation of new schools of law and arguably in the Hanafi school of law because they're pretty strict they don't want you going outside the established authorities in the school of law you have to pick one of their opinions if you have a new issue you can come up with a ruling for it but for existing issues you can't come up with any new answers so it's not so much about the end of interpretation because interpretation never stops because new situations are always arising and new situations cause us to re-evaluate old rulings because maybe we need necessities to create a new situation the desire for achieving some social good leads us to take a different ruling but the idea that the door that she had is closed is more an attempt of Muslim scholars after the 1300s to limit unlimited expansion of the number of rulings very good yes the gentleman with the glasses that I met earlier one or two more so many questions too many long answers thank you very much for your lecture I read recently a very good article by George Hurrani who did a Quranic analysis that made a case he thought for the Matazelite position being the correct Quranic one which was to say that the Quran presupposed an ethic of natural justice otherwise the ideas of justice that the Quran has introduced to the pagan meccans wouldn't have made any sense to them at all because they had to have some sort of presupposed idea of what justice was in the first place so do you tend to agree with that position that the Quran presupposes some idea of natural justice that presupposes divine law that's an interesting question I think that the Quran uses words like عدل which we talked about as sort of evenness even scales and then the Quran talks about معروف what is known to be right according to conventional understandings of right so it's معروف for example that I tip the waiter 20% in America but I don't know what it is in England so that's معروف none of those are substantially consistent essential notions of justice they're either relational or they're conventional when you talk about I think the reason that the majority of at least certainly Sunni scholars the majority of Sunni scholars rejected a natural law approach to justice is because it doesn't explain the diversity of human experience why is it that I mean I had to use this example earlier if you give America a plate of dog meat this person will throw up I mean it will be like the most unnatural thing you can offer them if you tell somebody that a 53-year-old man married a 9-year-old girl in America people will think this is they will be physically revolted there's other place in the world where people eat dog meat and the other place in the world where you have marriage between very young women and very old men and this has been going on for many thousands of years and continues until today in many parts of the world the human beings who are just as smart as you and me just as human as you and me have completely divergent ideas of what is just a right in different situations so in Muslim scholars I think one of the reasons that they didn't stick to a natural law conception is that there is nothing for them consistent in human nature that gives you a consistent idea of what's right across cultures if let's say human beings all love their parents they want to be around their parents parents love their children that's a species feature of the human race so it is a natural law in that sense but that's just like human beings have two arms and two legs it doesn't give you a moral position it just says that human beings have this tendency so I think they didn't see anything and in Romans we said there's just gentium everybody must think that this is the right way Muslim scholars were lived in two vast and empire they saw people with totally different customs and like Al Ghazali says in his Me'yad al-Enemi says if an alien if a creature came from another world to this world there's nothing that that creature would there's no reason there's no external moral reality that makes this creature know that killing a human being is wrong it just kill a human being it doesn't know that it's wrong if it's natural law if there's something or if there's a law that exists outside of human beings a moral reality then this alien would know that so they were very skeptical of this sort of natural law argument one more if there is okay this young lady up there just speaking up on your point about women not being reliable witnesses in Islamic law I just wanted to know the reasoning behind that and whether that stance is still applicable today so the okay I'll give you my opinion the four Sunni schools of law would all say that women have so in the Shafi school of law they're only allowed as witnesses in cases of contracts and wealth and property and things like that in situations when there's no like in child's birth or crying committed in the woman's locker room there's no men there there are such witnesses there based on the Quranic verse that tells us that if you're going to write a debt or a contract that you should bring two men as witnesses or one man and two women because if one woman forgets the other one reminder now the Shafi say this is the only situation in which you can have women witnesses the Hanafi school of law says no no no women can be witnesses except they're always half the value of a male witness in any area of law except حدود law which we don't want to get into and capital crime law like murder which we again don't want to get into but so there's different approaches one is sort of sees women witnesses as an exception the other one sees that as a rule excluded in certain exceptions but all of them see in the vast majority of cases that women are half the value of a man as a witness now then what happens is if in Taimiyah this school that everyone likes to hate died 1328 or his student if in Khaim al-Jawziah everybody likes to hate okay these evil conservative Hanbali scholars I'm Hanbali myself right they come along and they say what the heck is where did you get this the Quran isn't talking about if you're in a courtroom and you have a or a dispute before a judge women are only half the witness of a man it's talking about what's called what's called or basically notarization witnessing a contract that's not being a witness in a court that's bearing witness to a contract and what they say is that notions of what makes a witness reliable as a notary are based on culture so in America you have certain requirements that let's say a notary public has to meet in order to be the guy who comes to your house and stamps your mortgage you're buying a house or something like that you know he has to have a little stamp and he has to have the right know how to fill in the forms he has to pass certain tests these are conventional determined by every culture it happened to be at the Arabs at the time of the Prophet I didn't think that women were sophisticated enough in terms of commerce and debt to remember what the man was going to remember but they said this has no effect on bearing testimony or bearing witness in a court the Quran doesn't even talk about that so they said what's the difference between a man and a woman in a courtroom they just seeing what they saw or they're testifying what they know to be true if they're a reliable upstanding person it shouldn't matter if they're a man or a woman so their ruling which is unique is the ruling that I take because it's very well reason they point out that the evidence that Muslim scholars had relied on was not in fact pertinent to the question they're ruling on thanks very much apparently I've run out of time I'm glad you didn't ask such a question but I'm sure you will agree with me that we have been well and truly rewarded for coming to hear this lecture and we all thank you our speaker thank you for inviting me