Open Access Textbook: A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory

Title: A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory
Author: Vishanoff, David R.

"This open access textbook by David Vishanoff offers to students and scholars interested in the Islamic discipline of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) a critical Arabic edition and an English translation of Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī’s Leaflet on the Sources of Law (Kitāb al-Waraqāt fī uṣūl al-fiqh), along with a new explanatory commentary on the text and a method for readers to add their own comments to any page, paragraph, or phrase. Unlike the many traditional commentaries that have been written on al‑Juwaynī’s popular medieval handbook https://waraqat.vishanoff.com, David Vishanoff’s extensive commentary explains for uninitiated modern English-speaking readers the function and significance of each legal theory principle, and critically examines the conceptions of ethics, knowledge, and scriptural interpretation that are articulated or assumed in this classic summary of Islamic legal theory."

BOOK CONTENTS

• Introduction
  • Title
  • About this project
  • Studying Legal Theory with al-Juwaynī
  • Al-Juwaynī’s life and thought
  • The Impact of al-Juwaynī’s Leaflet
• Commentary
• English translation
• Arabic edition
• Appendices

Administrative: One million page views on AMIR

It seems appropriate to mention during the Open Access Week (Oct. 21-Oct. 27) that earlier this month AMIR has surpassed one million page views.

 Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR) project started in 2010 as a series of conversations between librarians about the need for a tool to assemble and distribute information on open access material relating to the Middle East and Islamic Studies. During the last nine years we have published hundreds of posts helping researchers identify freely available resources online.

Our statistics indicate that most frequently visited pages are the following:

Alphabetical list of Open Access Islamic Manuscripts Collections
Alphabetical List of Open Access Journals in Middle Eastern Studies
West African Arabic Manuscript Database
Arabic Almanac App

Using rather simple classification system we identified dozens of subjects helping users discover resources and navigate the site by country, theme or format:

Turkey	94
Manuscripts	66
Egypt	50
USA	48
Palestine	43
Germany	38
Iran	36
France	32
Israel	31
E-Books	26
Afghanistan	23

Web traffic to AMIR comes from many countries as seen below :

United States	400699
Germany	109683
Russia	101943
France	40690
Ukraine	28647
United Kingdom	24730
Turkey	20477
United Arab Emirates	7972
Egypt	7881

As always AMIR editors encourage you to browse the blog, send us your comments and recommendations of new and old open access resources to share. On the right hand side bar of AMIR is a form allowing you to receive  notifications of updates by email.
Please subscribe and if you are aware of open access scholarship on Middle East and Islamic Studies not yet listed here, please pass it along.

Open Access Archive - South Asia Open Archives

South Asia Open Archive

"The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA), a subset of the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP), creates and maintains a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia. This major collaborative initiative is aimed at addressing the current scarcity of digital resources pertinent to South Asia studies and at making collections more widely accessible both to North American scholars and to researchers worldwide."

Nearly 350,000 page images in the collection! 

Historical research materials in English and other South Asian languages are being digitized and prepared by SAOA for online public access. This material includes, for example:

Colonial-era administrative and trade reports
Women’s periodicals
Newspapers and magazines
Census materials and gazetteers
Important literary and other monographic sources

Open Access Archive - Digital Palestinian Archive

Digital Palestinian Archive

"The Birzeit University Digital Palestinian Archive (BZUDPA) is dedicated to documenting the life of Palestinians and their institutions over the past century, from Ottoman times to the present.The project, launched in 2011, aims to preserve a large variety of documents, written and audio-visual, relating to the history of the Palestinian people over the past century, and donated by individuals, families and popular organizations. Birzeit, as a national university, is fully committed to placing its technical and academic resources at the service of this project, which continually digitizes, places online and makes available a wide variety of documents. "