Acknowledgements
The artworks that appear in this monograph are not simply a support to the contents; they are themselves content.
For this reason, I would like to acknowledge here the people and institutions that have made possible their reproduction in the volume by granting copyright permissions.
My gratitude goes first to the private owner of the Najd Collection for the image of Gerome’s The Almeh with Pipe (Figure 0.1), and to the owner and managing director of Mathaf Gallery London, Mrs Gina MacDermot, who kindly provided the picture from the Gallery’s original catalogue. Both the reproduction of El Greco’s Christ Cleansing the Temple (Figure 1.1) and Utagawa Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake (Figure 4.1) have been permitted by the open access policy respectively of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. As far as Figure 2.1 is concerned, it brings me back to a distant period of study of Arabic in Cairo (where I took the picture while sitting in the Mosque-Madrassa Sultan Hassan in 2009): it was at that time that I started thinking about the echo of the divine Word in the tradition of fiqh, surrounded by the beauty of Islamic architecture.My writing has also been inspired by two exhibitions that I visited in 2019 at the Bodleain Library in Oxford; namely, Babel. Adventures in Translation (displayed 15 February - 2 June 2019) and Talking Maps (in programme 5 July 2019-8 March 2020), whose influence on this work can be clearly seen in the Introduction, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.
In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, I broadly draw from three articles - namely, ‘Property (mdl) and credit relations in Islamic law: an explanation of dayn and the function of legal personality (dhimma);’ ‘Between theory(-ies) and practice(s): legal devices (hiyal) in classical Islamic law;’ and ‘The Typewritten Market: Shari‘ah-compliance and securitisation in the law of Islamic finance’ - that I published respectively in 2013, 2017, and 2021. I am thankful to the Arab Law Quarterly for their permission to reproduce content.