Robert Gleave

Research Project

The Law of the Few: Jurisprudence in Mediterranean Minorities

Project Abstract

Jews, Christians and Muslims live as the “mainstream” or the “norm” in some Mediterranean contexts, but as minorities and marginalised in others. Even with the dominance of one tradition, it is sometimes (technically) sectarian: the contextual norms of Sunnism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity can create minorities of co-religionist communities. In the Islamic context, Ibadis and Shi’ites (Twelver, Ismaʿili and ‘Alawi) are Muslim religious minorities in a (Sunni) Muslim majority context. In Egypt, Christians are a minority (though they actually comprise numerous discrete communities).

Robert Gleave’s research focuses on the religious jurisprudence developed by scholars from communities living as religious minorities in the Mediterranean area. The research concerns communities living in areas where Islam is perceived as the religio-cultural norm and minorities – be they Muslims or members of other religions – are often given space to operate their own religious legal systems developed from that community’s own tradition of legal thinking. His work will address the question of how this minority status impacted the construction of religious law by the scholars of the minority community. The research will consist of a deep-dive research into three distinct contexts: Twelver Shi’ites in the Lebanese context; Christians in the Egyptian context; Ibadis in the Algerian context. How has the religious law developed by these communities reflected (or ignored) their minority status. Whilst much religious law assumes the community is in a position of power, these communities have lived as minorities for many centuries. What juristic mechanisms have the scholars in these groups developed to cope with minority status – given their religious affirmation of their community’s superiority.

First Egypt: Religious minorities in medieval Egypt have received increasing levels of scholarly attention in the recent years. Research on the Christian communities of Egypt living under Muslim rule has, relatively speaking, still in its infancy. Focussing on the operation of the law specifically, Jewish legal documentation has been subjected to more discreet and detailed examination than that available for the Christian communities in the medieval period. The tracts and monographs in which the theoretical operation of Church law is laid out, and the theological reflections on the status of that law when living under non-Christian political control are the primary source material here. There are a number of such tracts, written by Christian scholars of the time (comprising both clergy and laity) which outline this tradition. Composed primarily in Arabic, these were often presented to the Ayyubid or Mamluk rulers are descriptions of how the Christiaan community would organise itself under Muslim rule. One such tract forms the focus of this research, the Nomocanon of al-Ṣāfī Ibn ʿAssāl (d1260). This work exists in numerous manuscripts, and an edition has been published (Cairo, 1908). Ibn ʿAssāl walks a careful tightrope between remaining true to his Christian community and tradition (viewing the occupying Muslim forces as inevitably hostile) and accommodation with political power in order to preserve a faithful community life of the Christian community.

Second Lebanon: In the Nineteenth Century, there were numerous Shi’ite communities, living as minorities under Sunni (Ottoman) Muslim rule. It was the Twelver Shi’ites, though, who developed a sophisticated and developed theory of law over many centuries living as minorities in Sunni majority contexts. In the late 18th and early 19th century CE, Twelver Shi’ite communities in Jabal Amil, the Baalabek Valley and other areas west of Damascus, minority status was a way of life, and this developed into a precise religious vision amongst the scholars of the community. There was a tendency for anyone showing scholarly promise to be sent to the major shrine cities of Iraq and Iran. The cities of Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad in Iraq, and Mashhad and Isfahan in Iran, hosted seminaries where scholars from across the Twelver Shiite diaspora would study; the most promising would stay and make their career there, but many would return to their homeland after studies to take up positions of religious leadership back in their own communities. This scholarly traffic enabled the trends and developments of the shrine cities to filter back to more provincial scholarly centres. The key religious development in the shrine cities at this time was the demise of the Akhbari school of jurisprudence, and the rise of Usulism. The writings of these Shi’ite scholars from across the Muslim world, including their theories about law and its operation, are the primary source of this research. In commentaries (shuruh) and glosses (hawashi), scholars developed a “minority jurisprudence” which was closely linked to the jurisprudence of the Iraqi shrine cities (as most of the Lebanese scholars went to Iraq rather than the Iranian seminary cities); but it was also deeply informed by the situation of the Shi’ite communities living under non-Shiite (i.e. Ottoman) control.

Finally, Algeria: In the context of a modern nation state with a broadly secular ethos (such as Algeria), the political dominance of a single religious tradition is, perhaps, less explicit. Nevertheless, the framing of public discourse, the individuals who hold the positions of political power and the application of law (particularly as it relates to so-called personal status” matters) all indicate the continued normative status of a Sunni (and specifically Maliki) legal and ethical framework. In this research, Robert Gleave aims to study the fatwa production within the Algerian Ibadi community. Perhaps the best-known scholar, Shaykh Ibrahim Bayyud (d.1981), is famous for his fatwas. In many ways, they exhibit a perfunctory quality which, for scholars of Islamic law, might make them uninteresting. However, their very prosaic quality makes Bayyud and his fatwas significant; it exhibits a link to the wider trends in Islamic discourse, and an example of how a minority jurisprudence is, in effect, attempting to position itself as “unremarkable” within the wider milieu. Bayyud and others are of interest for an understanding of minority jurisprudence because their scholarly production covers both the colonial and independence period (he therefore worked as a scholar from a minority religious community under two political regimes).

Biography

Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK. Between September 2024 and January 2025, he will be the Averroes/Ibn Rushd Professor in Mediterranean Islam at Iméra. He researches the history of Islamic law, with a particular interest in legal hermeneutics in the Shīʿī tradition.

He has led international projects linked to these themes including Legitimate and Illegitimate violence in Islamic Thought (LIVIT) and Islamic Reformulations supported by the UK higher education funding agencies, AHRC and ESRC, and Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam (LAWALISI), funded by the European Research Council. He is author of Inevitable Doubt: Two Shīʿī Theories of Jurisprudence (Leiden: Brill, 2000), Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbārī Shīʿī School (Leiden: Brill, 2007), Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning in Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory (Edinburgh: EUP, 2012) and a number of articles and book chapters situating Shīʿī jurisprudence in the context of wider Islamic legal and practice.