Lawrence Rosen

Having worked for several decades in North Africa, anthropologist Lawrence Rosen is uniquely placed to ask what factors contribute to the continuity and changes characterizing the present-day Muslim world. In The Culture of Islam, he illuminates key aspects of Muslim life and demonstrates how central tenets of that life are being challenged and culturally refashioned. Both an antidote to simplified versions of Islam circulating today and a consistent story of the continuities that account for much of ordinary Muslim life, Rosen's work offers, in its human stories and its insights, its own contribution to the mutual understanding and forgiveness that alone will make true peace possible.

One out of five people in the world today lives subject to Islamic law, but stereotypes of rigid doctrine or harsh punishment obscure an understanding of the values and style of reasoning that characterize everyday lslamic adjudication. By considering its larger social and cultural context Islamic law is shown to be a kind of common law system: justice is sought through a careful assessment of persons, more than facts, and justice resides not in equality but in a quest for equivalence. Through ordinary court proceedings the style of reasoning is seen to be embedded in a set of cultural assumptions, thus rendering the study of Islamic legal proceedings a window on Muslim society generally. Using data ranging from the courts of North Africa to the treatment of Islam in American courts, from a reinterpretation of the Prophet's sociological jurisprudence to the analysis of Islamic concepts of responsibility and trust these essays demonstrate the enduring appeal of Islamic law in the lives of everyday adherents.

One out of five people in the world today lives subject to Islamic law, but stereotypes of rigid doctrine or harsh punishment obscure an understanding of the values and style of reasoning that characterize everyday lslamic adjudication. By considering its larger social and cultural context Islamic law is shown to be a kind of common law system: justice is sought through a careful assessment of persons, more than facts, and justice resides not in equality but in a quest for equivalence. Through ordinary court proceedings the style of reasoning is seen to be embedded in a set of cultural assumptions, thus rendering the study of Islamic legal proceedings a window on Muslim society generally. Using data ranging from the courts of North Africa to the treatment of Islam in American courts, from a reinterpretation of the Prophet's sociological jurisprudence to the analysis of Islamic concepts of responsibility and trust these essays demonstrate the enduring appeal of Islamic law in the lives of everyday adherents.

Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life. Using as its substantive base the Islamic law courts of Morocco, the study explores the cultural basis of judicial discretion. From the proposition that in Arabic culture relationships are subject to considerable negotiation the idea is developed that the shaping of facts in a court of law, the use of local experts, and the organization of the judicial structure all contribute to the reliance on local concepts and personnel to inform the range of judicial discretion. By drawing comparisons with the exercise of judicial discretion in America the study demonstrates that cultural concepts deeply inform the evaluation of issues and the shapes of a judge’s decision. The Anthropology of Justice is not only the first full-scale study of the actual operations of the actual operations of a modern Islamic law court anywhere in the Arab world but a demonstration of the theoretical basis on which a cultural analysis of the law may be founded.

Much modern anthropology has assumed that an adequate description of any society consists of rules that inform its members' relationships and the logic that unites their cultural symbols. In this book Lawrence Rosen argues that, for the people who live in and around the Moroccan city of Sefrou, attachment to others and the terms by which they are conceived are, at their most fundamental level, subject to a constant process of negotiation. Drawing on the philosophy of speech acts as well as interpretive theory, Rosen shows how, for the people of this Muslim community, reality consists of the network of obligations formed by individuals out of a repertoire of relational possibilities whose defining terms are comprised by a set of essentially negotiable concepts. He thus demonstrates that the bonds of family, tribe, and political alliance take shape only as the bargains struck in and through the malleable terms that describe them take shape; that statements about relationship are no more true than a price mentioned in the marketplace until properly validated; that the relations between men and women, Arabs and Berbers, Muslims and Jews test the limits of interpersonal negotiation; and that the concepts of time, character, and narrative style are consonant with a view of reality as bargained-for network of obligations. Bargaining for Reality makes an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern society and to the development of powerful new interpretive strategies for a wide range of social theorists."[Rosen's] book is extremely useful for African and Middle Eastern historians, because he challenges some of our most basic ideas about the nature and force of kinship, tribe, ethnicity, and other large- and small-scale political ties."—Allan R. Meyers, International Journal of African Historical Studies"The book conveys a compelling image of Moroccan social experience and is peppered with vivid anecdotes and case histories."—Stephen William Foster, American Anthropologist