Islam and the Instution of Marriage: Legal and Sociological Approaches

Islam and the Institution of Marriage: Legal and Sociological Approaches is a study of Muslim marriage in modernity. The question of marriage and intimate relationships is an important site of internal contestation, as the collection demonstrates. It demands both fidelity to the tradition and its historical modes of thought and relevance to contemporary conditions. The collection of essays that make up the study engages these important and difficult questions from the perspectives of two different types of scholarship: fiqh and social science. While fiqh practitioners work with the source texts to derive new interpretations, to authorise rethinking, and thereby to create spaces of possibility for practices to change, social scientists study practices of Islam. The contributors to this volume examine challenges to fiqh posed by the contemporary by critically analysing the practices and resources available to Muslims in a range of national and historical contexts. These critical approaches will enable a wide readership to understand how Muslims engage with the assumptions and epistemologies that underpin marriage and relationships in contemporary Islamic contexts.