Ahmed Ibrahim

Background: burnout syndrome is a serious and growing problem among medical staff. Its adverse outcomes not only affect health-care providers’ health, but also extend to their patients, resulting in bad-quality care. The COVID-19 pandemic puts frontline health-care providers at greater risk of psychological stress and burnout syndrome. Objectives: this study aimed to identify the levels of burnout among health-care professionals currently working at Assiut University hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: the current study adopted an online cross-sectional design using the SurveyMonkey® website for data collection. A total of 201 physicians were included and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) scale was used to assess the three burnout syndrome dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Results: about one-third, two-thirds, and one-quarter of the respondents had high emotional exhaustion, high depersonalization, and low person...

I offer a corrective to Libson's view that customs made their way into Islamic law in the formative period only through the ḥadīth and ijmāʿ genres. I argue that custom was incorporated into the law through the legal methodologies of Abū Ḥanīfa and Mālik. Due to the success of al-Shāfiʿī's thesis, later jurists justified custom on grounds of necessity and exigency of the times rather than elevating it to the level of the four-source theory of Islamic law. Essential to this process of valorization of custom was a legal maxim developed by al-Juwaynī in the classical period. Keywords custom – legal maxims – social custom – judicial custom – practice of Medina

The primary and secondary sources of Islamic law often assume a binary distinction between ijtihād and taqlīd, ignoring a third level of engagement with the sources, which was conceptualized by some jurists as forming a distinct category. In this article I discuss the evolution of the terms ijtihād, taqlīd, and ittibāʿ, using a conceptual-historical approach (Begriffsgeschichte). I argue that the use of taqlīd to mean “precedent-following” did not emerge as a technical term until after the time of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820). The distinction between precedent-following (taqlīd) and verifiable-following (ittibāʿ) did not appear in legal discourse until the time of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855). I also demonstrate that there were three approaches to these terms in legal discourse after the time of Ibn Ḥanbal, with three groups of jurists defining them in ways that advance their different visions of law-making. I conclude with a discussion of the debate over the meanings of these terms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article examines an Islamic legal equivalent of the Euro-American concept of the “best interests of the child,” a legal principle underpinning several international conventions. It presents various concepts and arguments made by premodern Sunni Muslim jurists in their discussions of legal rules regarding child custody, guardianship, maintenance, and travel with the ward. It contains four main overarching lines of investigation: the first deals with explicit discussions of whether custody and guardianship are rights of the custodian/guardian or the ward. The second section seeks to comprehend juristic assumptions about whose rights take priority in the event of conflict between the rights of the ward and those of the custodian or guardian. The third section deals with party autonomy and the fourth with actual Ottoman court practice, which should help us transcend the discussions of author-jurists and venture into the level of judicial discretion possessed by the judge in managing the conflicting needs and rights of wards, custodians, and guardians.

Many historians view Islamic law as an organic and methodologically coherent system in which there is a systematic link between legal methodology (uṣūl) and substantive law (furūʿ). In this essay, I will argue against the conventional view, drawing support from the evolutionary trajectories of four genres of juridical writing: abridged legal compendia (mukhtaṣars); juristic disagreement (ikhtilāf); the commentary/supercommentary (sharḥ/ḥāshiya); and legal responsa (fatāwā) genres. The post-thirteenth century evolution of these genres reveals a pronounced tendency to marginalize the relationship between legal methodology and substantive law, privileging a codification ethos. Judges and low-ranking jurisconsults were expected to “apply” legal rules and frequently abandoned legal methodology as an avenue for legal change in favor of pragmatic school boundary-crossing. In doing so, they were less concerned with intra-school methodological coherence than with pursuing juristic flexibility by focusing on the content of the law rather than its process.

In Pragmatism in Islamic Law, Ibrahim presents a detailed history of Sunni legal pluralism and the ways in which it was employed to accommodate the changing needs of society. Since the formative period of Islamic law, jurists have debated whether it is acceptable for a law to be selected based on its utility, rather than weighing conflicting articulations of the law to determine the most likely expression of the divine will. Virtually unanimous opposition to the utilitarian approach, referred to as "pragmatic eclecticism," emerged among early Islamic jurists. However, due to a host of changing institutional and socioeconomic transformations, a trend toward the legitimization of pragmatic eclecticism arose in the thirteenth century. Subsequently, the Mamluk authorities institutionalized this pragmatism when Sultan Baybars appointed four chief judges representing the four Sunni schools in Cairo in 1265 CE. After a brief attempt to reverse Mamluk pluralism by imposing the Hanafi school in the sixteenth century, Egypt's new rulers, the Ottomans, embraced this pluralistic pragmatism. In examining over a thousand cases from three seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Egyptian courts, Ibrahim traces the internal logic of pragmatic eclecticism under the Ottomans. An array of archival sources documents the manner in which Egyptian society's subaltern classes navigated Sunni legal pluralism as a tool to avoid more austere legal doctrines. The ensuing portrait challenges the assumption made by many modern historians that the utilitarian approaches adopted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim reformers constituted a clear rupture with early Islamic legal history. In contrast, many of the legal strategies exercised in Egypt's partial codification of family law in the twentieth century were rooted in premodern Islamic jurisprudence.