Judicial Authority and Qāḍīs' Autonomy under the ʿAbbāsids

Abstract

As Joseph Schacht argued in the 1950s, the office of qāḍī began in the Umayyad period as that of a “legal secretary” to provincial governors. Documentary evidence from Egypt confirms that governors were indeed regarded as the highest judicial authority in early Islam, and that their legal powers far surpassed that of any other judge. In large cities, governors appointed and dismissed qāḍīs at will; decisions taken by qāḍīs could be swiftly overruled by political authorities.Although the ʿAbbāsids reformed and centralised the judiciary in the second half of second/eighth century, qāḍīs were still subordinate to reigning rulers and unable to impose judgements that displeased the caliph or his main representatives. The increasing political and social influence of scholars and the development of classical schools of law eventually changed this situation. Relying on a body of both narrative and legal literature, this article addresses the qāḍīs' attempts to resist political rulers' interference with the judiciary by asserting themselves as true representatives of the sharīʿa. It argues that Ḥanafī legal literature, dating from the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, gradually elaborated a theory on the relationship between the qāḍī and the ruler. This theory was instrumental in doing away with political infringement on the judicial prerogative and was soon incorporated into adab literature, whose stories of rulers entirely subjugated to the rule of law became a new political model.