Hanafi law in Western, Central and South Asia, 12th-15th c.

Hanafi law in Western, Central and South Asia, 12th-15th centuries examines the history of the Hanafi madhhab in the so-called post classical period. The Hanafi school of jurisprudence is the largest of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, followed by more than a third of the worlds Muslim population today: from the Middle East and Russia, to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, to Xinjiang in China. Following conventional wisdom, the school is often characterized as the most rationalist or liberal of the four Sunni schools of law. The project Hanafi law in Western, Central and South Asia, 12th-15th c. examines the validity and usefulness of such attributions, in the context of a hitherto unexplored corpus of Hanafi legal texts of the post-classical eraworks that have been neglected in the field of Islamic Studies for too long, although their relevance continues unabated to this day. The project will pay particular attention to the complex interplay between legal theory, juridical practice and the role of various kinds of political and social authority in the articulation of legal norms. In this, the project thus hopes to make a meaningful contribution to a better understanding of the history of anafi jurisprudence in the postclassical period, at the threshold of the eve of modernity.