Mohamed Noor - Religion and Intellectual Culture

Dr. Mohamed Noor

It is widely acknowledged that commentaries played a crucial role in the post-classical Islamic intellectual tradition, including in Jurisprudence. However, the underlying factors that make commentaries important, as well as the reasons for their varying degrees of success, still need to be explored. What distinguished particular commentaries in terms of their canonicity relative to others? What roles did commentaries play within the Islamic legal culture? These are pertinent questions for understanding the development of post-classical Islamic Jurisprudence (fiqh) in a broader sense, and specifically in Shāfiʿism, one of the four major legal schools in Sunni Islam. This project explores how and why certain Shāfiʿī commentaries gained authoritative status from their creation during the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517) and in the centuries that followed, to their reception and use along the Bū Saʿīdī-administered Swahili coast (1856-1964). As such, the project aims to reorient research on the translocal dynamics within the field of Islamic Studies and extend its implications to broader areas of historical and religious scholarship. It targets to offer a framework for integrating textual analysis and historical and anthropological methods to investigate the processes of adaptation, continuity, and transformation of Islamic legal practices. With a special focus on the Swahili Coast of East Africa, the project aims to alleviate the Middle East-centeredness of research on the textual history of Shāfiʿī fiqh in particular, and Islamic jurisprudence in general.