Bibliographical Essay

On questions of periodisation, and the use of the term ‘Islamic Middle Period' in particular, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson's The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol.

The standard overview of the Sunni legal doctrine of crime and punishment is the succinct book by Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Offering more detail, but dealing with only one of the four Sunni legal schools, the Hanafis, is Baber Johansen, ‘Eigentum, Familie und Obrigkeit im hanafitischen Strafrecht: Das Verhältnis der privaten Rechte zu den Forderungen der Allgemeinheit in hanafitischen Rechtskommentaren’, Die Welt des Islams 19.1 (1979), 1-73. Few studies exist that examine the legal doctrines regulating specific crimes and their punishments. An exception is the in-depth monograph of Khaled Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

The standard work on political thought in the Islamic Middle Period is Patricia Crone, God's Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), which includes chapters on the various theological groups in Islam, as well as the Persian, Greek, Isma‘ili and Sunni legal traditions. More narrowly focused on issues of power and its ideological underpinnings is Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997). On the notion of siyasa (‘governance’, or ‘capital punishment’), a good place to start is Bernard Lewis, ‘Siyasa’, in Arnold H. Green (ed.), In Quest of an Islamic Humanism: Arabic and Islamic Studies in Memory of Mohamed al-Nowayhi (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1984), pp. 3-14. In addition, Ann K. S. Lambton has written prolifically on the question of government in medieval (Persianate) Islam; see, for example, her ‘Changing Concepts of Justice and Injustice from the 5th/ 11th Century to the 8th/ 14th Century in Persia: The Saljuq Empire and the Ilkhanate’, Studia Islamica 68 (1988), 27-60.

Historical studies of crime and punishment in the post-caliphal Islamic Middle Period include Christian Lange, Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Bernadette Martel-Thoumian, D'elinquance et ordre social: V'etat mamlouk syro-'egyptien face au crime 'a la fin du IXe-XVe si'ecle (Pessac: Ausonius, 2012); and Carl Petry, The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago, 2012).

As regards studies of crime and punishment in the formative and later periods, studies of punishment under the Umayyad caliphs (seventh-eighth centuries) have often focused on the question of late antique continuities and, relatedly, of the ‘Islamicness' of state punishment in the first two centuries of Islam. See Gerald Hawting, ‘The Case ofJa‘d b. Dirham and the Punishment of “Heretics” in the Early Caliphate', in Lange and Fierro (eds.), Public Violence, pp. 27-41; Andrew Marsham, ‘Attitudes to the Use of Fire in Executions in Late Antiquity and Early Islam: The Burning of Heretics and Rebels in Late Umayyad Iraq', in Robert Gleave and Istvan Kristo-Nagy (eds.), Violence in Islamic Thought from the Qur 'an to the Mongols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 106-27; Sean Anthony, Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle: Umayyad Crucifixion in its Late Antique Context (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2014). For post-Mamluk times, the classic study of the Ottoman system of crime and punishment is Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. V. L. Menage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).