SHARIAsource

A Toledan man named Ibn Ḥātim was accused of being a heretic by sixty witnesses on the initiative of a fellow Toledan called Ibn Labīd al-Murābiṭ. The judge consulted with the local jurists, and following their legal opinions, he sentenced the accused to death. However, he granted the accused the right to challenge the witnesses (iʿdhār). Ibn Ḥātim escaped from Toledo and found refuge in the neighboring kingdom of Badajoz. Ibn Labīd went after him, carrying a copy of the judge’s sentence (tasjīl) along with the legal opinions of a number of non-Toledan jurists. In Badajoz, the ruler withdrew his support from Ibn Ḥātim, who fled again, this time to Cordoba. While in Cordoba, the “moral” police arrested Ibn Ḥātim, and the judge imprisoned him, giving him two months to prove his innocence. Unable to do so, Ibn Ḥātim was crucified alive. A number of legal issues arise in the course of this case: should the process of iʽdhār—the right to challenge witnesses—be granted to those accused of heresy (zandaqa)? Should refuge be granted to them? What happens with the estate or inheritance of an executed zindīq? Can a judge reverse a sentence given by another judge? The source is a collection of court cases by Andalusi scholar Ibn Sahl (d. 486/1093), and it is based on information directly available to the compiler, who was also a witness of most of the events described.

Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushanī recorded the following case as a ḥikāya, an anonymous report: A Christian appeared before the judge Aslam b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, petitioning to be executed. The anecdote offers insight into the historical role of judges during a period of religious dissent in the Umayyad Caliphate, while the author's narrative voice demonstrates past judicial approaches to rationality, humor, and violent penalization. 

This text is part of Maribel Fierro, The Judges of al-Andalus, forthcoming.

On December 26, 2008, Mariam Ayad ("Wife") and Ayad Hashim Latif ("Husband") got married.  They executed a prenuptial agreement ("Islamic Prenuptial Agreement") on the same day, which the wife alleges she considered to be a customary marriage certificate, not a contract conferring substantive rights and limitations on the Husband and the Wife, respectively.  The couple have a son.  Their marriage started deteriorating in 2020, at which point the Wife alleges she learned for the first time about the existence of the Islamic Prenuptial Agreement and the fact that she had executed it on the day of her marriage with her Husband.  On January 25, 2021, the Wife filed for divorce.  The Husband countersued for divorce and filed a motion to have the Islamic Prenuptial Agreement enforced, which provides that all divorce-related matters, including spousal support, child support, alimony, and marital property division, shall be resolved through the ruling of a fiqh panel to be convened.  The trial court, in rejecting the Wife's arguments regarding the invalidity and unenforceability of the Islamic Prenuptial Agreement, which the Wife had argued based on her assertion that she had thought she was signing a cultural document at the time of signing and that she was not given an opportunity to read and understand the terms, ruled in favor of the Husband and held that the prenuptial arrangement be enforced. 

The Wife appealed to the appellate court seeking relief from the order of referral to arbitration of the trial court.  In her submission to the appellate court, the Wife made four separate arguments:

1. The Islamic Prenuptial Agreement is void on grounds of contravening public policy, as the agreement clearly disavows Texas law and the laws of the United States, and replaces those with Islamic Law, which, according to the Wife's submission, "limits the rights of a woman to obtain a divorce," in violation of Equal Protection, the Establishment Clause, and Due Process, given the different weights assigned by Islamic law to official testimony from women compared to men.

2. The Islamic Prenuptial Agreement is void as a matter of Texas contract law because the agreement was involuntarily executed.

3. The trial court abused its discretion in finding that the Islamic Prenuptial Agreement stipulated to arbitration, as the agreement does not contain evidence of a meeting of the minds as regards an intent to arbitrate.  The agreement's mention of a "fiqh panel" or a "Muslim court" cannot unequivocally be read as an agreement to arbitrate.

4. Relatedly, the trial court also abused its discretion in referring the dispute to arbitration without allowing the Wife to present meaningful evidence refuting the existence of an alleged agreement to arbitrate.

The case is pending before the Texas appellate court.

[Sharifian Decree of May 16, 1930] 919 Jarīda Rasmiyya 1322 (June 6, 1930): As the famous “Berber Decree,” this conferred official legitimacy to the Berber jamaʿas and their chiefs for civil matters (Article One), while Article Six notoriously called for all penal matters within Berber jurisdictions to be adjudicated in French courts. Although this Decree became renowned for the intense reaction it provoked in the nascent nationalist milieu, most of its stipulations (including Article Six) were never implemented.