Dr. Morgan Clarke (University of Oxford): Islam and Law: Sharia within and without the State.

About the Speaker:

Dr.Morgan Clarke is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College. He is the author of Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009) and Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia within and without the State (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

About the Topic:

Under Lebanon’s confessional legal and political system, family legal matters for Muslims fall under the jurisdiction of ‘sharia courts’ (mahakim shar‘iyya), Sunni and Ja‘fari (Twelver Shi‘i). In this talk, Morgan Clarke describes the legal and social foundations of these sharia courts, as well as their day to day operations, based on extensive fieldwork in the courts in Beirut and various textual resources.He further describes the relationship between the sharia as understood and applied in these courts, within the context of a wider civil legal system and plural religious society, and the sharia as understood and practiced outside of the courts, in mosques, study circles and the offices of religious authorities. There is a tension between sharia as law and sharia as personal ethics that Morgan Clarkeperceives as of more general importance to the study of sharia, but also to the comparative study of law andmorality.

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