Investigating the Conceptualisation of Labour within the Islamic Legal Discourse during the 12th to the 15th Century

Emunds, Laura (25 November 2021). Investigating the Conceptualisation of Labour within the Islamic Legal Discourse during the 12th to the 15th Century (Unpublished). In: PhD Seminar on Slavery, Servitude & Extreme Dependency. Universiteit Leiden, Leiden (Niederlande). 25.-26.11.2021.

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This paper aims at introducing the participants of the PhD Seminar on Slavery, Servitude & Extreme Dependency, held at Leiden University on November 25 and 26 2021, to a PhD project that deals with the investigation of the legal conceptualisation of labour within the Islamic legal discourse between the 6th/12th and the 9th/15th century. Abstract concepts such as ‘labour’ are often used and referred to without questioning their meaning or providing a proper contextualisation or historicisation. Moreover, our understanding of labour and the associations coming to our minds when thinking about it are heavily influenced by the way of thinking rooted in what is often referred to as the ‘European modernity’. The PhD project will question these assumptions through a thorough investigation of the Islamic legal discourse in the period following the much-invoked ‘closure of the gate of ijtihād’ and the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 656/1258. Starting points of the research project are various Arabic terms denoting work and labour, as well as several forms of contractual regulations. One of these is the kitāba-contract, an agreement which enables an enslaved person to purchase their own freedom from their owner, will be introduced briefly as a case study within this paper. The sources investigated within the project’s framework cover a broad range of Islamic legal literature. They include texts of legal theory such as jurisprudential works (Ar. fiqh), fatāwā (Ar. sg. fatwā, responsa to specific questions) and ḥisba (an institution related to the supervision of markets) and notarial manuals. Furthermore, archival and documentary evidence, for example preserved contracts, will be taken into consideration as well as other genres such as lexicography. In order to cope with this amount of source material, the project will make use of methods developed within the field of Digital Humanities.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institut für Studien zum Nahen Osten und zu muslimischen Gesellschaften
UniBE Contributor:	Emunds, Laura
Subjects:	200 Religion > 290 Other religions 900 History > 950 History of Asia 900 History > 960 History of Africa
Language:	English
Submitter:	Laura Emunds
Date Deposited:	19 Jan 2022 14:04
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 16:01
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/163870