Islamic Legal Canons as Memes
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Abstract
In her essay concluding the Roundtable, Intisar Rabb invites us to conduct a thought experiment— to think of legal canons as memes, that is, as cultural elements in circulation that, like genes, self-replicate and accrue to the benefit of human society. Just as memes spread, so do legal canons—principles that guide legal interpretation—from one scholar to another, from one written record to the other. Describing at length multiple angles from which legal canons can be categorized, Rabb shows that the many and varied types of canons illustrate how deeply embedded canons are in the social, cultural, and also legal culture that produces them. That, in turn, invites close collaboration between legal historians and data scientists to enable a mapping of a “meme pool” for legal canons, which she pursues through developing the Courts & Canons project at Harvard Law School: through digital tools, we will be able to trace the curious textual travels of legal canons (as memes), and through that, the transmission of cultures, practices, and ideas in through all manner of texts (their meme pool) recording the history and practice of law and society in the Muslim world.
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Intisar Rabb, Harvard Law School
Professor Intisar A. Rabb is a Professor of Law, Professor of History, and the Faculty Director of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School. She has held appointments as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as an Associate Professor at NYU Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and at NYU Law School, and as an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School. She previously served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a Temple Bar Fellow in London with the American Inns of Court, and as a Carnegie Scholar for her work on contemporary Islamic law. She has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, including the monograph, Doubt in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press 2015), the edited volumes, Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (with Abigail Balbale, Harvard University Press, 2017) and Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook et al., Palgrave 2013), and numerous articles on Islamic constitutionalism, on Islamic legal canons, and on the early history of the Qur’an text. She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.