Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel:: A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Sharia in the British Mandate and the Jewish State
Eisenman, Robert
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Robert Eisenman’s classic work, Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel: A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Sharia, examines how Islamic law, such as Shari law, survived in Palestine and Israel in a pure form perhaps longer than in any other Ottoman successor state. It did this for a variety of reasons, chief among which are the innate conservatism of the British and the inability of the Israelis, particularly in the country’s early days, to do much about it. Besides Lebanon and Gaza, only in Israel did those three great monuments of Islamic and Ottoman modernism: the Ottoman Law of Family Rights, the Ottoman Land Code, and the Mecelle-i Akham-i Adliye, survive simultaneously.Author, Robert Eisenman, traces this continuity from Ottoman times in terms understandable to both specialists, lawyers, and laypersons. The anomaly of Islamic laws', such as Sharia law, survival against the backdrop of British legal concepts and renascent Jewish nationalism is delineated completely. Detailed attention is also given to the effect, or non-effect, of such Israeli reforms in Women’s Equal Rights Law on the Muslim community and on Islamic law, as well as to the creation of Israeli hybrid laws, such as the Land Law of 1969, and a new Israeli modernism.The situation in Israel today remains more or less the same. In some areas beyond the 1967 Green Lines, where Israeli Law has been applied, it is as described in this book. In others, which have not been annexed or where it has not, Jordanian Law for the most part still obtains - - -This work was originally carried out at the suggestion of Prof. Joseph Schacht. If it overstresses Islamic law in Palestine and Israel as a civil law for all persons (i.e., the Mecelle), it does so because he was particularly interested in this aspect of the problem. He himself had already done considerable work on other similar hybrids, that is the development of Anglo-Muhammadan Law in India and the various developments of Islamic law in Nigeria. That Palestine, and later Israel, turned out to be one of the last places where some of the great monuments of Islamic legislation of the Tanzimat and the Young Turk period survived, even after they had already been replaced in Turkey itself and other Ottoman successor states of the region, made the study all the more compelling.In the course of the research, it turned out that some of the most interesting developments took place in the areas of land law and personal status, outside the ongoing situation in civil law. Though Schacht would not have thought of the Land Code as an original piece of Islamic legislation, still one finds in it so much material of clear Islamic inspiration, that it would be difficult not to consider it. Besides, it contains some of the most fascinating material in the whole discussion and to have ignored it would have detracted from the work as a whole. The section on the code itself in Part One makes an attempt to separate out some of its more Islamic aspects from its Turkish customary ones. For this reason, too, in the first part, it was felt necessary to go into at some length the Islamic aspects of these Ottoman codification attempts generally, as no such similar study exists. For the discriminating reader, who cares about these fine-points, it is hoped this will suffice.
Independently published
2019-02-05
364 pages