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Science and technology have been long-standing dimensions of the political legitimation of monarchic, shaikhly and imperial rule in the modern Gulf. Scientific development has been supported by attendant sociotechnical imaginaries, but these imaginaries have not been without fissures or contradictions. In the modern Gulf sheikhdoms, sociotechnical imaginaries were fashioned at the intersection of local, regional, and imperial processes. A range of actors participated in these contestations, drawing on shifting cultural ideas about human frailty and progress, continuing social and economic exchanges across the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean, and varying experiences of imperial constraint and possibility. This article examines how Islamic legal actors in Qatar shaped sociotechnical contestations in the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on medical technology and the problem of drunk driving in the 1960s, I show how Islamic procedural law became connected to new regimes of expertise and modern forms of power inextricably tied to the Qatari nation-state. I suggest that the Islamic legal concepts mobilized by the ulama, which initially served to protect a space of Muslim privacy against technological anonymity and the regulatory ambitions of the modern state, became increasingly unintelligible as the expansive logics of state bureaucracy were adopted and naturalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can one write the modern legal history of the Gulf states without projecting onto the past the contemporary hegemony of the modern nation-state? What narratives other than secularization stories might be told? And what archives are available to us to facilitate such an endeavor? This paper addresses these questions with reference to Qatar, where a powerful sharia judiciary developed under the British Protectorate maintained its autonomy until the 1990s. The publications of the Presidency of Sharia Courts (est. 1958) and the work of its long-time president, Shaykh ʿAbdallāh b. Zayd Āl Maḥmūd (1911–97), suggest that oil wealth, modern state bureaucracy, and the British legal order expanded – rather than curtailed – the scope of sharia law in Qatar in the course of the twentieth century. Sharia scholars and institutions reinforced the rule of law, contributed to minimizing the role of customary norms in society, replaced commercial courts and alternative modes of dispute resolution, and helped establish an autonomous legal sphere separate from political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.2006.00152.x Byline: Alexandre Caeiro (1) Author Affiliation: (1)ISIM Leiden, The Netherlands

Since the 1990s, an increasingly diverse set of Muslim scholars and institutions has called for the integration of social science into the system of Islamic normativity. This article explores some historical and conceptual issues raised by this call. It approaches the issue through an examination of one of its central concepts: the notion of fiqh al-wāqi' (the fiqh of reality or realistic fiqh). The article traces this concept's distinctively modern history, situating it in the context of various projects of religious reform and in relation to specific anxieties regarding the nature of modern law. Taking a set of controversies related to Yusuf al-Qaradawi's fatwas on Muslim minorities as a case-study, it then argues that the concept of a "realistic fiqh" renders visible not only the difficulties that social scientific inquiry presents to the hermeneutical commitments of the Islamic legal tradition, but also the challenges that the layered structure of reality in the Islamic tradition poses to the sociological imagination. In conclusion, this paper briefly addresses two implications of the Islamic legal debates discussed previously: the question of the political and the limits of methodological individualism. It also suggests that contemporary Islamic legal scholars who struggle with these questions may be laying the ground for the development of a critical Islamic jurisprudence centrally concerned with the articulation of facts, values, and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]