Adnan Zulfiqar, Rutgers Law and Stanford Humanities Center, will present “The Caliph’s Jihad: Medieval Jurists, Duties and the Search for Political Cohesion”
- This event has passed.
This draft chapter is from a forthcoming book that explores the premodern Islamic legal discourse on collective duties. The book argues that jurists expand the category of collective duties, between the mid-tenth and mid-thirteenth centuries, as a response to the fracturing of the Abbasid empire and with the hope of unifying society. This particular chapter explores how jurists reinforce the centrality of the caliph’s role in warfare and his regulatory function over the duty to fight in order to achieve greater political cohesion.