Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law

by Khaled Abou El Fadl

• ISBN13: 9780521793117
• ISBN10: 0521793114
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Khaled Abou El Fadl's book represents the first systematic examination of the idea and treatment of political resistance and rebellion in Islamic law. Pre-modern jurists produced an extensive and sophisticated discourse on the legality of rebellion and the treatment due to rebels under Islamic law. The book examines the emergence and development of these discourses from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries and considers juristic responses to the various terror-inducing strategies employed by rebels including assassination, stealth attacks and rape. The study demonstrates how Muslim jurists went about restructuring several competing doctrinal sources in order to construct a highly technical discourse on rebellion. Indeed many of these rulings may have a profound influence on contemporary practices. This is an important and challenging book which sheds light on the complexities of Islamic law and pre-modern attitudes to dissidence and rebellion.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments	viii
Introduction	1	(7)
Modern scholarship and reorienting the approach to rebellion	8	(24)
The doctrinal foundations of the laws of rebellion	32	(30)
The historical context and the creative response	62	(38)
The rise of the juristic discourse on rebellion: fragmentation	100	(62)
The spread of the Islamic law of rebellion from the fourth/ tenth to the fifth/ eleventh centuries	162	(72)
Rebellion, insurgency, and brigandage: the developed positions and the emergence of trends	234	(61)
The developed non-Sunni positions	295	(26)
Negotiating rebellion in Islamic law	321	(22)
Works cited	343	(29)
Index of names	372	(6)
Index of subjects	378