Islam and the Institution of Marriage: Legal and Sociological Approaches

Islam and the Institution of Marriage: Legal and Sociological Approaches (edited by Katherine Lemons and Laurens de Rooij) 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.

Dr Katherine Lemons:

Katherine Lemons is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her research is in the areas of anthropology of Islam, law, and gender. She is the author of Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism (Cornell University Press 2019).

Dr Laurens de Rooij:

Laurens de Rooij gained his doctorate at Durham University in England. He is currently an Associate Lecturer in the Sociology of Islam at the Al Mahdi Institute. His research examines how non-Muslim people in Britain interact with news reports about Islam and Muslims and how that affects their interpretation and conceptualisation of Islam and Muslims. Laurens has spent time at a number of institutions across the globe, including The Graduate School of the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, Indonesia (spring 2013), the Religion Department atDuke University in Durham North Carolina, USA (Autumn 2013), The Centre for Religion, Media and Culture in the Journalism & Mass Communication Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, USA (spring 2014), and at Brazil’s Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (summer 2016). In 2017 he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town for a year, where his research analyses howthe media discourse on minorities (particularly Muslims and Islam) affects how they are conceptualised, understood, and treated in South Africa. This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He was also a lecturer at the University of Chester (2018), and a researcher at London Metropolitan University (2018-2020), Toulouse School of Management (2021-2022) in France, and Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand (2022-2023).