Why Another Bibliography of Islamic Law?
Studies on Islamic law and its various sub-fields have grown exponentially since the early eighties of the last century. Even the specialist will hardly be able to keep track of, let alone read, the large number of titles that are being published all over the world.
While this assessment applies to Islamic law in general, it is also correct with regard to the sub-field of Islamic criminal law. There are a number of important reasons for this surge in scholarship over the past forty years. In particular, the interest in Islamic criminal law has grown with the number of countries legislating it, Brunei being just the latest example. This process has not stopped since Colonel Gaddafi spearheaded it in 1972, and there is little reason to believe that it will not continue in the future. Further, a large body of research has been produced in countries where some form of Islamic criminal law has been enacted, e.g. in Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia. Many new journals, often founded by Sharia faculties in these countries, produce new scholarship in English as well as in other languages. New open access journals and the possibilities the internet offers in general facilitate the publication of books and articles and thus contribute to a wealth of new publications. Scientific, legal, political and other challenges also contribute to the steady growth of the field. Scholars now deal with the challenges of bioethics, suicide terrorism, cybercrime, forensic psychology, money laundering and more. Finally, a large number of ngo s and ingo s deal with human rights violations in Muslim majority countries that often are in connection with aspects of codified Islamic criminal law. They publish well-researched and extensive reports on their websites. All of these trends make up for a plethora of books and scholarly articles on the subject at hand. Indeed, the number of publications on Islamic criminal law and matters related to it are more than the individual scholar and researcher is able to oversee. This finding in itself would justify the publication of this bibliography.But does a printed bibliography still make sense in a time of extremely rapid search machines that deliver tens or hundreds of thousands of results in milliseconds? Is it not easily possible to find all these entries with a quick google search? I still remember how I spent weeks and months in the 1980s and early 1990s sifting through the traditional card index boxes at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, filling in order forms and waiting for the books and articles to be ready for consultation. The world has changed since then. The internet has made any search for literature a lot faster and ostensibly much simpler. In addition, the searching can be done from home, and the results, i.e. the books and articles one finds, thanks to digitalisation, can often be consulted or read on your computer at home as well. However, the mere wealth of information has also become unmanageable. It needs to be structured and sorted. This is what this bibliography attempts to do. It maps an important sub-field of Islamic law, divides its different aspects into chapters that are easily searchable and thus not only renders it easily accessible to the researcher and student but also documents and charts the developments within Islamic criminal law during the past decades. It should be noted that this is the first Islamic criminal law bibliography of this size ever published. With more than 3,600 entries its size also surpasses all other bibliographies on Islamic law in general. This bibliography thus gives enhanced visibility to a field that is of eminent scholarly but also political importance. It will be of interest to those researching Islamic law in general, to students and researchers of Islamic criminal law in Muslim majority countries in particular, but also to researchers and activists dealing with human rights in the Muslim world.
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