Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination
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How
was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in
medieval Islam? What role did state punishment play in delineating the
private from the public sphere? What strategies were deployed to cope
with the suffering caused by punishment? These questions are explored in
Christian Lange's in-depth study of the phenomenon of punishment, both
divine and human, in eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Islamic society. The
book examines the relationship between state and society in meting out
justice, Muslim attitudes to hell and the punishments that were in store
in the afterlife, and the legal dimensions of punishment. The
cross-disciplinary approach embraced in this study, which is based on a
wide variety of Persian and Arabic sources, sheds light on the interplay
between theory and practice in Islamic criminal law, and between
executive power and the religious imagination of medieval Muslim society
at large.
