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Muslims in Norman Sicily: The Evidence of Imām al-Māzarī's Fātwas
Abstract
This article examines the relationships of trade and communication between Christian Sicily and Muslim North Africa in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, after Sicily was removed from the dar al-Islam by the Norman conquest. Despite the creation of a religio-political boundary between the island and its former provincial capital in North Africa, Muslim merchants continued to sail from North Africa to newly-Christian Sicily in order to transact commercial exchanges. Such commercial voyages into Christian territory continued despite their prohibition by the influential jurist Imām al-Māzarī. Examination of several of al'Māzarī's pronouncements on cases involving Norman Sicily shows that even though he was supportive of Muslim populations who remained on the Christian island, the jurist disapproved of intentional travel there by Muslim merchants. This suggests that the notion of a boundary between the Christian and Muslim worlds was flexible: in some instances the frontier could be passable while for other purposes or other thinkers, the Muslim-Christian divide was considered rigid.
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has often referred to its dispute resolution system as the “crown jewel” of the world trading system. However, the current crisis on the lack of a quorum in the Appellate Body is slowing down the dispute resolution process at the WTO considerably. Notwithstanding, African countries have an alternative dispute resolution mechanism available under the soon to be operationalized African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA Agreement). This paper aims to highlight the efficiency of the AfCFTA dispute resolution mechanism as compared to that of the WTO. To this end, it is divided into four parts. Section 1 sets the background to this paper by expounding dispute settlement at both the WTO and AfCFTA. Section 2 focuses on the concept of concurrent jurisdiction between the two systems. It intends to find out whether recourse to one system automatically bars a state party from seeking a remedy in the other dispute resolution system. Section 3 concentrates on the similarities between the two systems. Section 4 highlights the lessons that AfCFTA may draw from other dispute settlement mechanisms (DSM) on the African continent and recommends changes to the AfCFTA dispute resolution system.
This chapter aims to provide a general background and overview of the so-called International Commercial Courts (ICCs) recently established in various states in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In essence, ICCs are specialised English-speaking commercial courts that focus on international commercial dispute resolution. ICCs are as such often in direct competition with international commercial arbitration, yet the line between them has become increasingly blurred in some aspects.ICCs are more grounded in history than often presumed. They build forth upon an enduring legacy of “internationalised” national or “hybrid” courts, i.e. courts which have an international element such as serving foreign judges. This practice has existed throughout the ages and continues to be the norm in various jurisdictions worldwide, including in certain major legal hubs such as Hong Kong. Especially the colonial-era mixed courts invite comparisons with ICCs as these courts often also acted as a special forum for foreign businesses and interests. Plus ça change?
Abū al-Qāsim ibn Aḥmad al-Burzulī’s (d. 1438) chapter on jihād in his compilation of fatāwā is a resource for investigating historical circumstances of interactions between Muslims and Christians in an era of military, political, and economic competition in the central Mediterranean. Al-Burzulī’s work is an extended commentary on fatāwās composed by a variety of jurists in different historical periods and his analysis can be read as atemporal. However, al-Burzulī occasionally relates his analysis to context, both historical and contemporary. When he locates his exegesis of legal opinions in the environment of their production, he reveals the process of legal interpretation and invites our engagement with his perspective as a view on his world.
This chapter gives an overview of the emergence of the Muslim preaching movement Tablighi Jama'at following the Deobandi orientation and how it evolved into a global format of missionary work for Islam.
Throughout the twelfth century, a number of Arabic-speaking Muslims produced poetry in the court of the Normans of Sicily. This article examines literary figures active under Roger II in the context of their interlocutors, professional colleagues, and other contemporaries around the western Mediterranean and North Africa. It argues that, in this context, most of the Sicilian Arab literary figures were only secondarily poets, their primary role being within a chancery or other administrative milieu, and that they continued to assert an undiminished Islamic identity, although living under Christian rule. This identity is mirrored in the intertextual play on topoi (maʿānī) found in Sicilian Arabic poetry, which was heavily engaged with cultural activity around the Mediterranean.
Throughout the twelfth century, a number of Arabic-speaking Muslims produced poetry in the court of the Normans of Sicily. This article examines literary figures active under Roger II in the context of their interlocutors, professional colleagues, and other contemporaries around the western Mediterranean and North Africa. It argues that, in this context, most of the Sicilian Arab literary figures were only secondarily poets, their primary role being within a chancery or other administrative milieu, and that they continued to assert an undiminished Islamic identity, although living under Christian rule. This identity is mirrored in the intertextual play on topoi (maʿānī) found in Sicilian Arabic poetry, which was heavily engaged with cultural activity around the Mediterranean.
Since the mid-1980s, Muslim jurists and theologians have discussed the permissibility of mass-scale Muslim permanent voluntary settlement in majority non-Muslim countries and the unique challenges Muslim minorities face in secularizing Christian societies. Their efforts constitute a new field in Islamic jurisprudence, fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima (the religious law of Muslim minorities). A number of participants in this field have introduced analogies between present realities and the first hijra – the migration to Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia) with the blessing of the Prophet Muhammad. The objectives of this article are twofold: (a) to point to the roles of these analogies in fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima discourse and (b) to demonstrate how Islamic jurists and theologians interpret similar or almost similar mythical narratives to support conflicting arguments. The article draws on a qualitative reading of several dozen religious decisions, treatises and sermons by jurists and theologians collected from mosques, Islamic centres and libraries in Europe, as well as from online resources.
In 1300 two Muslim women sued a local aljama official in Daroca, claiming he had unlawfully evicted them from their houses, and physically mistreated them, all without due legal process. In the trial, after witnesses corroborated the womens’ claims, the defendant accused them of being unreliable. These objections were not admitted by the magistrate, who found in the women’s favor, and punished the official. A close reading of the process reveals that, far from being a straightforward case of abuse of power, the defendant may well have been in the right. If so, the framing of Ali Dexadet, the lieutenant alamín of Daroca, exemplifies the debilities of Islamic justice in mudéjar Aragón, and reveals the depth of the factionalism which often characterized minority communities.
En Daroca, en 1300, dos mujeres mudéjares demandaron a un oficial de su aljama, alegando que, sin ningún derecho, las había desahuciado de sus casas y maltratado. En el juicio, varios testigos corroboraron sus afirmaciones, pero el acusado, alegó que no eran fiables. Sin embargo, el magistrado rechazo esta defensa, y declaró culpable al oficial musulmán, puniéndole de manera ejemplar. Lo que, a primera vista, parece un caso obvio de abuso de poder por parte de este oficial, podría haberse tratado, bien al contrario, de una injusticia. Es factible que el acusado, Ali Dexadet —lugarteniente del alamín de Daroca— fuera una víctima inocente de las prevaricaciones de sus enemigos. Si fuera así, este caso pone de manifiesto la debilidad de la justicia islámica en el Aragón mudéjar, y la rencorosa política interna que, en ocasiones, podía caracterizar a las comunidades minoritarias.
Through crusades and expulsions, Muslim communities survived for over 500 years, thriving in medieval Europe. This comprehensive new study explores how the presence of Islamic minorities transformed Europe in everything from architecture to cooking, literature to science, and served as a stimulus for Christian society to define itself. Combining a series of regional studies, Catlos compares the varied experiences of Muslims across Iberia, southern Italy, the Crusader Kingdoms and Hungary to examine those ideologies that informed their experiences, their place in society and their sense of themselves as Muslims. This is a pioneering new narrative of the history of medieval and early modern Europe from the perspective of Islamic minorities; one which is not, as we might first assume, driven by ideology, isolation and decline, but instead one in which successful communities persisted because they remained actively integrated within the larger Christian and Jewish societies in which they lived.
Sicily and southern Italy during the Middle Ages have been a neglected area of study for many years, primarily due to the general belief that the area fell into decline after the ‘fall’ of Rome. Recently, however, there has been growing interest in the Muslims of medieval Sicily and Italy, as well as the Jewish and Greek populations that lived under Latin Christian rule for many centuries. There has also been a rise in scholarship on the medieval Mediterranean region as a whole, which has caused a re-evaluation not only of the role and importance of the Mediterranean world, but also of how the medieval European system worked, how Latin Christendom related to the Muslim states on its southern borders, and what roles Muslim cultures and settlements played in the development of Italy’s society.
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