September 2023 – Trasisblog

TraSIS team: Reflections on the 29th DAVO Congress

September 28, 2023 TraSIS Team

The TraSIS team made their way to the charming city of Vienna last week for the 29th annual congress of the DAVO (German Middle East Studies Association), held in conjunction with the fourth annual Turkologentag (European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies). Some 800 delegates were in attendance. The congress featured a fascinating mix of papers by Middle Easternists and Turkologists, with a compelling keynote by Professor Edhem Eldem that addressed the progress of the last few decades—as well as the very…

What Can We Learn about Slavery from a Manual for Judges and Notaries?

September 8, 2023 Serena Tolino

Introduction This month’s blog post focuses on the relevance that shurūṭ manuals written for judges and notaries have for understanding practices related to slavery, and legal practices more generally. Shurūṭ works, or “model shurūṭ works,” as Wael Hallaq puts it in his seminal article on the topic, are works that reproduce standardised legal contracts or judicial rulings in a range of domains for easy use by legal professionals. The need for this genre arose partly because persons with inadequate knowledge…

Unfortunately, it Ended: Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Societies Conference in Murtensee

September 5, 2023 TraSIS Team

The TraSIS team organised its first project conference last week, in collaboration with the BCDSS (Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies). We were honoured to welcome scholars from more than ten countries to discuss questions related to slavery in Islamic law and Muslim societies. The conference, which took place on the shores of Lake Murten, featured a keynote lecture by Prof. Christian Müller (CNRS, Paris) on ‘New Sources for Muslim Social History? Premodern Legal Documents from a Comparative Perspective’. Over…