The state of the field

Abstract

This book is concerned with the relative contributions of Roman and provincial law to the Sharīʽa, the holy law of Islam. While Roman law needs no introduction, the term ‘provincial law’ may puzzle the reader. It refers to the non-Roman law practised in the provinces of the Roman empire, especially the provinces formerly ruled by Greeks. In principle non-Roman legal institutions should have disappeared from the Roman world on the extension of Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire in 212; in practice they lived on and even came to influence the official law of the land. There were thus two quite different sets of legal institutions in the Roman Near East which was to fall to the Arabs, and both need to be considered in discussions of the provenance of the Sharīʽa. This is not a new observation. It is nonetheless worth stressing it again, for in practice it has been forgotten. There is no literature on the genetic relationship between provincial and Islamic law; and though there are numerous works on the potential contribution of Roman law, their quality is mostly poor: apart from a handful of pioneer works written in the decades around the First World War, practically nothing has been added to our knowledge of the question since von Kremer wrote on it in 1875.