The Many Roads to Justice : A Case of Adultery in Sixteenth Century Cairo.

This piece of research looks at a controversial case of adultery which flared up in Cairo in 1513 under the reign of the Mamluk Sultan Qānsūh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501-1516). The case involved the judicial elite and provoked the dismissal of the four Chief Qadis of the city (one Chief Qadi - qāḍī ’l-quḍāt - for each Sunni school of law). It enacted a violent clash between the justice of the Sultan and his officers (commonly described by Muslim jurists and modern scholars alike as siyāsa) and the religious justice of Qadis, muftis and jurisprudents (sharīʿa). At its center are the Islamic legal resources that enact frictions between legal and moral norms such as that provoked by the incident of the Cairene lovers. André Jolles’ (d. 1946) morphological insights are used as a useful paradigm for an enquiry into a certain typology of Islamic juristic discourse. The pattern and concept of 'case' as a fundamental cross-cultural literay form (Jolles finds adequate embodiments of his case-form in ancient Indian literature as well) reveals itself a beneficial heuristic tool, applicable to Islamic legal discourse too; a discourse which fully partakes to the cross-cultural paradigm devised by Jolles.