Centre Jacques Berque (CJB), Rabat/Morocco
Over the last four years, the ERC financed project ILM (Islamic Law Materialized: Arabic Legal Documents (8th to 15th centuries)) has constituted a corpus of 2000 legal documents with more than 50 000 textual entities. It analyses the intimate relationship between these relics of pre-modern legal practice and the juridical scholarship (fiqh) of their time. This analysis, to be presented in the conference, provides evidence that the “theoretical concepts” of fiqh were essential to, and provided juridical coherence for, notarial and judicial practices as reflected in legal documents.