Expert Witness in Islamic Courts
Medicine and Crafts in the Service of Law
Islam's tense relationship with modernity is one of the most crucial issues of our time. Within Islamic legal systems, with their traditional preference for eyewitness testimony, this struggle has played a significant role in attitudes toward expert witnesses. Utilizing a uniquely comparative approach, Ron Shaham here examines the evolution of the role of such witnesses in a number of Arab countries from the premodern period to the present.
Shaham begins with a history of expert testimony in medieval Islamic culture, analyzing the different roles played by male experts, especially physicians and architects, and females, particularly midwives. From there, he focuses on the case of Egypt, tracing the country's reform of its traditional legal system along European lines beginning in the late nineteenth century. Returning to a broader perspective, Shaham draws on a variety of legal and historical sources to place the phenomenon of expert testimony in cultural context. A truly comprehensive resource, "The Expert Witness in Islamic Courts" will be sought out by a broad spectrum of scholars working in history, religion, gender studies, and law.
About the Author
Ron Shaham is a senior lecturer in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University and the author of Family and the Courts in Modern Egypt.
Reviews
"Shaham draws attention to a subject that has been noted by diverse scholars but insufficiently addressed in full, and he brings a wealth of material and issues together in a single place. This is a significant contribution to studies of the role of expert witnesses in legal systems as well as to Islamic scholarship at large" – Lawrence Rosen, Princeton University
"This book contains the first systematic study of the role and function of expert witnesses in Muslim courts, from the rise of Islam down to the present. Treating law as a cultural phenomenon and social process, Shaham exposes the inner logic of the Islamic legal system and shows how fiqh law changed over time. Adopting a comparative approach, he demonstrates that many of the concerns of Muslim judges and jurists are similar to those of legal agents in other legal systems, including our own. After establishing the role of expert witnesses in traditional Muslim courts, he describes how the rise of the modern nation-state transformed the role and function of expert witnesses, paying special attention to the relationship between religious knowledge and science. Whereas modern Egyptian judges and jurists regularly use blood-typing and DNA evidence in criminal and civil cases, they mostly oppose the use of these types of evidence in those instances in which it threatens traditional notions of the family, e. g., in cases dealing with sexuality, gender, and paternity. This book, which is based on wide reading in primary and secondary sources, will be of interest not only to Middle East specialists but also to legal historians, social historians, and comparativists" – David S. Powers, Cornell University
