What This Bibliography Covers
A Bibliography of Islamic Criminal Law covers all books and articles I could find on the subject, with no particular time limitation, starting with the 19th century to the most recent publications.
It does not include book reviews and short encyclopaedia entries. However, if an encyclopaedia entry is longer and is closer to a short introduction to a given key theme I have included it. In many bibliographies Ph.D. dissertations and m.a. theses are not taken into account despite their often important scholarly contribution. I have therefore tried to find and include as many pertinent Ph.D. dissertations and m.a. theses as I could find. A certain number of them can be downloaded for free with the help of the bibliographical details provided here. At an early stage of the work I decided to refrain from adding annotations to entries because the rapidly rising number of titles I was able to compile simply did not allow for it. The choice of languages included is as simple as it is unsatisfactory. I have included all the European languages I can read well plus a few titles in languages I read less well but where the subject was clear and fitting. The compromises I had to make are obvious. A number of relevant languages are missing, especially those from countries with Muslim majorities, such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Indonesian and others, as well as, e.g., all the Slavic languages. I decided to exclude these languages because either I don't read them or when I do (Arabic, Persian), including them would have made my (and the publisher's) task complicated and time-consuming to a degree that would have made the whole project unfeasible. An argument in my defence is that all bibliographies on Islamic law I am aware of have made that same choice for probably the same reasons.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]I have also not included urls because they are not only often very long and cumbersome to type, but are also ephemeral and become outdated and unusable rather quickly. Further, with the high-powered browsers available, it is faster and easier to copy or type the title of a book or the name of an author into a search machine. At this point it deserves to be mentioned that a certain number of the listed titles can be found on the internet for free. In the past 20 years open access journals of varying quality have multiplied. Many publish high-quality peer-reviewed articles. Others are of more dubious quality and are often the product of the thriving activities of rogue publishers who not only lack peer review but often publish almost without or with only rudimentary quality checks. It goes without saying that articles from such sources have not been accepted into this bibliography, except in justified cases.