Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen [Paperback]

In early 20th-century Yemen, a sizable Jewish population was subject to sumptuary laws and social restrictions. Jews regularly came into contact with Islamic courts and Muslim jurists, by choice and by necessity, became embroiled in the most intimate details of their Jewish neighbors lives. Mark S. Wagner draws on autobiographical writings to study the careers of three Jewish intermediaries who used their knowledge of Islamic law to manipulate the sharia for their own benefit and for the good of their community. The result is a fresh perspective on the place of religious minorities in Muslim societies.

Finalist, 2015 Jewish Book AwardsJews and Islamic Law in early 20th-century Yemen offers an important theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of minorities and marginal groups.

A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews Under Early Islam by Uriel Simonsohn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). ISBN 9780812243499.

Mark S. Wagner has made an important and original contribution to the growing body of adaemic studies on Yemenite Jewish history and culture. . . Although the book's theme is how Jews negotiated life in a traditional Muslim society in which the Sharia was theoretically the overarching governing framework, Wagner also offers fascinating insights into the complexities of daily social, economic, and political life in Yemen.

This book offers an important contribution to the understanding of Jewish-Muslim relations under theshari'a, and to the study of Yemeni Jews.

Mark S. Wagner is Associate Professor of Arabic at Louisiana State University and author of Like Joseph in Beauty: Yemeni Vernacular Poetry and Arab-Jewish Symbiosis.

In beautiful prose, Mark Wagner explores the complex contours of Yemen's sharia-based juridical system, considering how individual Yemeni Jewish women and men navigated this legal order and the larger social orbit of Yemeni society. Moving ably between Arabic and Hebrl£S