Report on CILE International Seminar: “The Ethics of Wilāya”

 Prepared by Sara Abdelghany (CILE)

 On February 23-24, 2023, the Research Center for Islamic Ethics and Legislation (CILE) hosted an international research seminar titled “The Ethics of Wilāya,” and convened by Dr. Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto Faculty of Law).

 This seminar was preceded by a public lecture held on February 21, 2023 titled “The ethical duties of wilāya in the Islamic Tradition.” 

Dr. Mohammed Ghaly, CILE’s Acting Director opened the seminar by thanking the seminar participants and explaining that CILE holds various events including conferences and seminars on interdisciplinary issues related to Islamic ethics and Islamic thought. He also stated that the Center offers many opportunities to its internal faculty and external researchers to convene seminars and conferences. CILE undoubtedly supports continuous academic partnership and exchange with researchers internally and externally, as many of CILE’s activities are held in association with other institutions, research centers, and universities. Researchers have the opportunity to collaborate with CILE through:

 ● the Visiting Professor program, hosted for one semester, where professors gain research funding, and may also teach a course in the Masters of Arts in Applied Islamic Ethics, through Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)

 ● the Journal of Islamic Ethics, published by Brill and indexed by Scopus,

 ● the Studies in Islamic Ethics Series, published by Brill,

 ● an annual international conference, CILE’s most recent international conference was held on March 15-16, 2023 and focused on the The Interplay of Islamic Ethics and Human Rights, 

● CILE Winter and Summer Schools

 CILE, along with the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), will host the International Association for Bioethics’ 17th World Congress of Bioethics on June 2-6, 2024, to be held for the first time in the Middle East and the Muslim World. 

Dr. Fadel then offered introductory remarks on the seminar topic, wilāya. He explained that, through this seminar, he aimed to understand how wilāya impacts ethics in our material and spiritual lives. Dr. Fadel discussed the theological conception of wilāya, and delved into how it frames ethical duties in the relationship between God, man, and believers in God. He also discussed the differences in Sunni and Shia approaches to the concept through the imāmate role, as well as the Sufi understanding of the spiritual and material relationship between God and a murīd on the Sufi path. The concept may be further extended to everyday social, political, and legal relationships such as that of a parent and child and a ruler and their subjects. Indeed, through this seminar he aimed to present interdisciplinary perspectives of the concept of wilāya in the Islamic state, and from various forms of Islam, not only encompassing Sunni Islam, but also Shia, Sufi, and other Islamic viewpoints.

 Day 1: Thursday February 23, 2023 

The first speaker, Dr. Yasmeen Daifallah (University of California, Santa Cruz), presented her paper titled “The Politics of Wilāya: Taha Abdurrahman and the Concept of the Human.” She focused on contemporary Moroccan Islamic philosopher Taha Abdurrahman’s conceptions of political theory and the human being to show how wilāya can serve as a mechanism to political and public ethics and achieving self-cultivation. Dr. Daifallah began by advocating for a “return to ethics” in contemporary political theory, arguing that wilāya is a conceptual solution to socio-political issues resulting from pluralism. She then discussed Abdurrahman’s understanding of human nature, which sees humans through commonality, not difference, and presents humans as “two-dimensional,” inhabiting two worlds - the material world (‘ālam al-shāhāda), physically inhabited, and the spiritual world (‘ālam al-ghayb) accessed spiritually and intellectually. Dr. Daifallah further explained that these two dimensions are what cause people to be political or religious actors, one is a political agent (fā‘il siyāsī) when material desires are their starting point, and a religious agent (fā‘il dīnī) when one acts from the realm of the spiritual world. Thus, religion and politics are not separate in Abdurrahman’s thought. She also covered Abdurrahman’s conception of collective politics through the “sovereignty of Allah” (taḥkīm Allah), which enables the umma to manage its political affairs through self-cultivation, self discipline, and limiting human tyranny. Finally, she concluded with Abdurrahman’s conception of group-focused governance through the Jurist’s Guardianship (wilāyat al-faqīh), which Abdurrahman sees as privileged to the legal elite, he argues that this role should, instead, be an educational one that adds to the public’s self-cultivation and ethical behavior.

 The second paper “Walāya in Medieval Khurasani Sufism” was presented by Dr. Jason Welle (Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, Rome). He examined the thought of Sufi scholar ‘Abdulraḥmān al-Sulamī to understand the relationship between virtue ethics and Sufi wilāya (spiritual authority and sainthood). Dr. Welle explained that there are three elements - customs (ādāb), acquired virtues (akhlāq), and spiritual states (aḥwāl) - that exist in a hierarchy and work in tandem with moving stations (maqāmāt) of spiritual progress in al-Sulamī’s understanding of wilāya and ethics. Progressing in this hierarchy requires an agency shift from the believer to God. While al-Sulamī does not have a lengthy discussion of wilāya in his work, He explained that he saw the walī and the Sufi as similar, adding that al-Sulamī echoes those of the Malamatiyya group who frown upon public piety and ostentation. A believer who has properly cultivated moral values, and has adab, would not show off their morality. Then, Dr. Welle discussed examples of Sufi wilāya in al-Sulamī’s work. Divine marvels (karamāt), which are gifts granted by God to saints, confirming sainthood and authority, that must remain private and concealed from others. External observers will nevertheless recognize the true saints, affirming that karamāt have been granted. Dr. Welle connected this to virtue ethics because one’s virtues are observable by others, especially when one exercises those virtues. He also considered potential elitism in Sufi wilāya discourses, because few people are considered virtuous by them, only the friends of God (awliyā’ Allah). The Shaykh/Murīd relationship is an example of Sufi wilāya that does not go beyond the spiritual elite, while it provides a spiritual guide for believers, it is at the hand of a Shaykh. Dr. Welle concluded by explaining that this presents a specific understanding of morality, dependent on visible virtues, since an external observer should recognize the wilāya of another, while also recognizing that sainthood should not be revealed to others.

 Dr. F. Redhwan Karim (Markfield Institute Higher Education) presented the third paper “Wīlaya and the Quranic Ethics of Gender Reciprocity.” Gender relations are normatively understood by scholars of the Islamic legal tradition as based on hierarchy and superiority through wilāya, but there are modern scholars who critique this view by arguing that exegetical traditions are patriarchal interpretations, and more recent critics who critique the modern view. Wilāya and gender hierarchy in the Islamic tradition most specifically manifests in the marriage contract where, in most cases, a woman requires a male guardian (walī) to validate or annul the marriage on her behalf. The Qur’an is not always the basis for juristic legislation, Dr. Karim pointed out, thus he turned to the Qur’an to understand the Qur’anic basis of ethical gender relations. Instead of focusing on the word “qawwāmūn” in Surah al-Nisā’ (Q. 4:34), often used to limit women, he focused on the Qur’an’s definition of wilāya in Surah al-Tawba (Q. 9:71). While (Q. 4:34) is explicitly tied to marriage, (Q. 9:71) refers to men and women as awliyā’ (guardians) of each other, and Dr. Karim argued that (Q. 4:34) falls under the definition of gender relations in (Q. 9:71). He then discussed genres of wilāya in the Qur’an: divine wilāya, Satan’s wilāya, and people’s wilāya, which covers many different relationships. Dr. Karim then applied the Q. 9:71 wilāya understanding to“enjoining the good and forbidding the bad” (al-amr bi-l ma‘rūf wa-l nahī ‘an al-munkar), explaining that this is a collective duty where women are active agents. He maintained that here women have a responsibility that warrants socio-political participation, in contrast to normative understandings that limit women’s public participation. Finally, he situated his arguments in Islamic tafsīr literature, invoking the arguments of Ibn Kathīr and Rashīd Rīḍa, who uphold the view that women are among those who enjoin in good and forbid the bad. Thus, Dr. Karim explained that ethical Islamic gender relations should not be hierarchical but reciprocal, where women have an active socio-political presence.

 Day 2: Friday February 24, 2023

The fourth paper, titled “The Ethicality of Wālī and Wilāya and the Mechanisms Provided in Jurisprudence to Ensure the Observance of Ethics in Wilāya” was presented by Dr. Javad Fakhkhar Toosi (University of Toronto). His paper centered on the mechanisms of ensuring wilāya and its ethicality from a juristic (fiqhī) perspective. Dr. Toosi began by maintaining the distinction between individual and governmental ethicality, as a ruler only requires governmental ethicality, and explained that wilāya is conceptually related to the idea of sovereignty and governance, where the close reciprocal relationship between the walī and mowla results in “wilāya.” Dr. Toosi explained that jurists define an ethical person as a just person. This individual governs justly, in a manner that leads to a stable state through the observance of pious actions in government. He differentiated between individual and governmental justice, here, to maintain that a person may embody personal justice and ethical qualities, like piety, but when in a political governance role become unjust. To prove his point, he described the ḥadīth on the potential wilāya of Abu Dhar, where the Prophet (PBUH) explains that not all individuals, even good individuals, have the capacity to be a walī. Wilāya, Dr. Toosi maintained, is not dependent on whether someone is pious in their personal life, a walī must be a person who is worthy and capable of governance. He concluded by considering the jurists’ mechanisms of verifying a ruler’s ethicality and capability of wilāya, including criticizing authority figures (al-naṣīḥa lī ’immat al-muslimīn), civil disobedience of immorality, and “enjoining the good and forbidding the bad” (al-amr bi-l ma‘rūf wa-l nahī ‘an al-munkar). The latter should especially be practiced by the governed towards the governor, not only vice versa. 

The seminar’s final paper was presented by Dr. Aiyub Palmer (University of Kentucky) on “Power Authority in the Ethical Basis of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī’s Vision of wilāya.” This paper focused on Sufi ethics and understandings of power and authority as conceptualized by al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, compared with Alexandre Kojève’s theory of authority, to present how Islamic institutions can function within the structure of the modern state. Dr. Palmer began with a discussion of “power” and “authority” as concepts in philosophy and sociology. He explained that, in the Qur’an, God grants the authority figure (walī) the power (sulṭa) to carry out justice, and from this Muslim legal theorists make a distinction between “wilāya” and “sulṭa” to differentiate between the Muslim community and those in governance. This differentiation, Dr. Palmer argued, is essential to maintaining justice in Islamic political theory. Then he moved on to Kojève’s theory, which proposes that all forms of authority are combined versions of the relationships between: parent and child, master and slave, chief and group, and the judge, where the latter’s authority is a combination of the previous three. Kojève’s conception of the chief’s authority mirrors al-Tirmidhī conception of the authority of the “friends of God” (awliyā’ Allah). As ulema, awliyā’ have textual knowledge (‘ilm), external knowledge and knowledge of the soul’s deficiencies (ḥikma), and gnosis (ma‘rifa). Al-Tirmidhī sees them as “the inheritors of prophetic religious authority,” who wield authority (wilāya) and political power (sulṭa) based on their values of virtues (akhlāq) and justice (‘adl). Wilāya is further connected to akhlāq because of the self-cultivation process that the walī undergoes, demonstrating noble characters. Dr. Palmer also compared al-Tirmidhī’s understanding of the walī/mowla to Hegel’s theory of the master-slave dialectic, explaining that wilāya is a reciprocal relationship based on mutual recognition that requires that the mowla recognizes the walī’s authority. This contrasts the master/slave as the master does not need the slave to recognize his authority. Dr. Palmer concluded by explaining that viewing wilāya through this lens demonstrates the connection of knowledge to freedom because knowledge has power (‘ilm, mar‘rifa), balanced with ethical conduct, and presents a critique of the liberal perspective of governance from Islamic thought.

 This seminar was also attended by Dr. Andrew March (UMass-Amherst), Dr. Azfar Moin (University of Texas, Austin), Dr. Ovamir Anjum (University of Toledo), who, in addition to Dr. Fadel, served as respondents to the presenters’ papers.

CILE International Seminar

Wilāya and Islamic Ethics

Background Paper

Dr. Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) 20-23 February 2023

Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics Hamad bin Khalifa University

Doha, Qatar

1. Introduction

Sunnī jurists use the term walī and its various cognates – wilāya, awliyāʾ, mawlā, wālī, mutawallī, etc. – ubiquitously in various chapters of positive law, but particularly in chapters dealing with public office. For example, another term for the caliph or ruler is walī al-amr, and the term for the successor of the ruler is walī al-ʿahd, both terms being contractions for the longer phrase walī amr al-muslimīn and walī ʿahd al-muslimīn. The ubiquity of words derived from the root wa-la-ya to describe political officials in Sunnī law is conceptually significant insofar as other common words used to describe rulers – such as malik – even if they were frequently used in popular parlance, literary sources, or historical works, were never used by the jurists themselves to describe Muslim rulers.

The moral significance of the concept of walī for politics and rulership can be seen by comparing its meaning to the alternative term malik. The root ma-la-ka, for example, connotes domination and despotic power. In Lisān al-ʿArab Ibn Manẓūr quotes Ibn Sīda as saying the following:

“Al-malku wa’l-mulku wa’l-milku iḥitwāʾ al-shayʾi wa’l-qudra ʿalā al-istibdād bihi ‘Malk’ and ‘mulk’ and ‘milk’ [all of them] mean encompassing something and the unilateral power to determine it.”

(Lisān al-ʿArab, ed. ʿAbd Allāh ʿAlī al-Kabīr et al., 6: 4267 (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, n.d.)

The root wa-la-ya, while it includes power, implies a purposive exercise of power. Ibn Manẓūr quotes Ibn al-Athīr as saying:

“Wa-kaʾanna al-wilāya tushʿīr bi’l-tadbīr wa’l-qudra wa’l-fiʿl wa mā lam yajtamiʿ dhālika fīhā lam yunṭaliq ʿalayhi ism al-wālī

It is as though ‘al-wilāya’ connotes planning, power and action, and if these are not present in it [i.e., the action], the word ‘wālī’ should not be used [to describe the actor].”

(Lisān al-ʿArab, 6:4920)

From an external perspective, the malik and the walī or the wālī seem to overlap insofar as both exercise power over someone or something, with the decisive difference arising out of the relationship of the powerholder to the object of the power: the malik can act unilaterally toward it (al-istibdād bihi) while the wālī uses his power to act according to a plan that is for the benefit of object.

The affective relationship that exists between the wālī and the object of the wālī’s power is manifested in the idea of support (nuṣra) that is also associated with the root wa-la-ya and which is absent from the root ma-la-ka. Accordingly, the term walī and its cognates (wilāya, walāya, walāʾ, mawlā, muwālāt) connote strong moral resonances in Arabic, insofar as these terms all convey closeness, friendship, care, and support, among other meanings. Not only does the Quran describe the believers, men and women, as the awliyāʾ of one another (al-Tawba, 9:71), it describes God as being the walī of those who believe (al-Baqara, 2:257). Sufis, Muslim mystics, appropriate the term wilāya to describe the special relationship between the devoted servant of God and God, calling those believed to be particularly close to God, walī, see, e.g., Farīd al-Dīn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tadhkirat al-Awliyāʾ and Abū Nuʿaym al-Aṣbhānī, Ḥilyat al-Awliyāʾ.

Al-Shāṭibī, in Kitāb al-Maqāṣid of al-Muwāfqāt, subsumes the Sufi dimension of wilāya into the legal dimension of wilāya when he analogies the world-renunciation of certain Sufis (whom he calls arbāb al-aḥwāl) to the guardian entrusted to manage the property of the orphan (wakīl māl al-yatīm) or an official dividing property owned in common (qassām):

Fa-inna ṣāḥibahu yarā tadbīr allāh lahu khayran min tadbīrihi li-nafsihi fa-idhā dabbara li-nafsihi inḥaṭṭa ʿan rutbatihi ilā mā huwa dūnahā wa hāʾulāʾ hum arbāb al- aḥwāl wa minhum man yaʿuddu nafsahu ka’l-wakīl ʿalā māl al-yatīm in istaghnā istaʿaffa wa in iḥtāja akala bi’l-maʿrūf wa mā ʿadā dhālika ṣarafahu ka-mā yuṣraf māl al-yatīm fī manāfiʿihi fa-qad yakūn fī’l-ḥāl ghaniyyan ʿanhu fa-yunfiquhu ḥaythu yajib al-infāq wa yumiskuhu ḥaythu yajib al-imsāk wa in iḥtāja akhadha minhu miqdār kifāyatihi bi-ḥasab mā udhina lahu min ghayr isrāf wa lā iqtār wa hādhā ayḍan barāʾa min al-ḥuẓūẓ fī dhālika al-iktisāb fa-innahu law akhadha bi-ḥaẓẓihi la-ḥābā nafsahu dūna ghayrihi wa huwa lam yafʿal bal jaʿala nafsahu ka-āḥād al-khalq fa-kaʾannahu qassām fī al-khalq yaʿuddu nafsahu wāḥidan minhum.

The world-renunciant believes that God’s plans for him are better than the plans he makes for himself, and that were he to plan for himself, it would degrade him, and place him in a station beneath that which [God assigns him]. These are the saints. Among them are those who deem themselves[, with respect to their own property,] to be in the position of the guardian of an orphan’s property: if they are not in need, they refrain from consuming [their own property], and if they are in need, they consume only in moderation. Whatever excess they have, they spend it as the property of an orphan is spent: for [ the orphan’s] benefit. If in the circumstances they are not in need, they spend out of his property where it is required and prevent it from being spent where it should not. If they are in need, they take only what they need in accordance with what is permitted to them, spending neither excessively nor niggardly. That, too, amounts to a kind of repudiation of self-interest in that labor. Indeed, [from their point of view] if it had been the case that they took into account their own interests, they would have preferred themselves over others, but they refrain from so doing, and instead they deal with themselves as though they were simply one of God’s creatures. It is as though he partitions property among God’s creatures, treating himself as one of them. (al-Shāṭibī, ed. ʿAbd Allāḥ al-Darrāz, al- Muwāfaqāt, 2: 193 (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.).

2. The Different Contexts of Wilāya in the Islamic Tradition

 Wilāya is a significant theological, Sufi and legal term.

It is a theological term because God is described as the walī of the believers. At the same time, God is also described as malik and mālik.

It is a Sufi term because the relationship between the seeker and God is understood as a kind of wilāya. Not only is the relationship between the seeker and God one of wilāya, some saints according to important strands of Sufism exercise a kind of spiritual sovereignty – wilāya – over the world.

It is a legal term because the activity of governing is described using the term wilāya, as opposed to other possible terms, and the norms of wilāya inform jurists’ understandings of the qualifications for public office, the ends which public officials should pursue, and the legal consequences of their decision-making. Mohammad Fadel has shown how ideas of wilāya and agency (wikāla) taken from relationships between private persons1 were appropriated by Sunnī jurists to develop a framework for regulating the conduct of public officials, and determining the extent of their authority to make rules for the public.2

One principal goal of this Seminar is to increase our knowledge of how Muslims understood wilāya as a substantive ideal along these three different dimensions, whether the concept of wilāya served to bridge these different discursive traditions, for example, if there were shared understandings of wilāya despite the different concerns of these different discourses, or whether traditions of thinking about wilāya, by contrast, are incommensurate, with the use of a common term only coincidental. The recent works of Huseyin Yilmaz,3

1 Mohammad Fadel, “Fiduciary Principles in Classical Islamic Law Systems,” Oxford Handbooks (Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190634100.013.30.

2 Mohammad Fadel, “Islamic Law Reform: Between Reinterpretation and Democracy,” Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law 18, no. 1 (2017): 44–90, https://doi.org/10.1163/22112987_01801005.

3 Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Waleed Ziad4 and A. Azfar Moin5 demonstrate the potential relevance of integrating these different discourses to understand better developments in Islamic political thought in later Islamic centuries.

Topics that might be explored in the context of this Seminar include, but are not limited to:

• What is the meaning of the divine wilāya that God exercises toward the world, generally, and the believers in particular?
• What are the limits of this wilāya? Does it extend to non-believers? (cf. al-Baqara, 2:257 (implying that non-believers are not within God’s wilāya) Are there sectarian interpretations of wilāya in the Muslim tradition, e.g., is this relationship limited to some, not all Muslims? Are theological uses of wilāya related to the idea of the “saved sect (al-firqa al-nājiya)?
• What is the history of the idea of saintly wilāya, and what is the nature of the wilāya that saints exercise in this life? Is it limited to the spiritual domain or does it effect the temporal realm? Is there a potential for conflict between the temporal wilāya that public officials exercise and the wilāya that saints exercise? Can we find historical cases of jurists using the concepts associated with wilāya to reverse or resist effectively the arbitrary or unlawful decisions of public officials? What evidence is there, if any, of institutional mechanisms that might have operationalized the legal ideal that public officials must be accountable to the public and the individuals under their care as legal doctrine seemed to suggest?
• What do the different conceptions of wilāya in the Islamic tradition teach us about Islamic political theorizing? To the extent that there are different conceptions of wilāya in Islamic political thought, can we talk about different conceptions of “friendship” for the purposes of understanding Islamic political theorizing,

4 Waleed Ziad, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2021).

5 A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, South Asia across the Disciplines (New York [N.Y: Columbia University Press, 2012).

analogous to different political ideas of friendship in the modern Western tradition, e.g., Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political as fundamentally about the friend-enemy distinction,6 or John Rawls’ idea of civic friendship as the telos of the political?7 Does the doctrine of the Imāmate in Shīʿism render wilāya superfluous or does it transform it in some way to distinctive to Shīʿism?

 3. The Ethical Dimension of Wilāya

It is revealing that Shāṭibī sees something in common in the ethical disposition of the virtuous public official and the saint: both exercise their authority and power without regard to their self- interest, each possessing the capacity to view themselves in a detached fashion, “as though he were simply one of God’s creatures.” What the virtuous ruler and the saint share is the virtue of being other-regarding, īthār, i.e., the capacity to place the interests of others before themselves. This suggests that wilāya is also an ethical practice.

Some topics that would be of interest to the Seminar include:

• What are the particular virtues that Muslim theorists have identified with wilāya?
• What kinds of practices did Muslims identify as crucial for cultivating the virtues associated with the ethic of wilāya?

4. The Gendered Dimension of Wilāya

With a few notable exceptions, classical Muslim jurists largely excluded women from exercising the authority associated with wilāya.8 Gender-based restrictions on the exercise of wilāya were not, however, limited to public offices such as that of caliph or judge; women were also not

6 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

7 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001), 126.

8 Mohammad Fadel, “Is Historicism a Viable Strategy for Islamic Law Reform? The Case of ‘Never Shall a Folk Prosper Who Have Appointed a Woman to Rule Them,’” Islamic Law and Society 18, no. 2 (2011): 131–76, https://doi.org/10.1163/156851910X537793.

legally authorized to serve as guardians for their own minor children according to the majority of the Sunnī jurists. On the other hand, according to these same jurists, women – and not just the mother – could serve as the designated guardian (waṣī) of minor children if their father appointed her.9

Likewise, Quran 4:34 (al-Nisāʾ), provides that “men are the maintainers (qawwāmūn) of women.” Qayyim, a cognate of qiwāma, is at times used in the legal context of trust law (fiqh al- awqāf) to refer to a person exercising supervisory duties of one sort or the other over the trust’s property, subjecting that person to a fiduciary duty. The close association between the duty of support and maintenance (qiwāma) and the concept of wilāya has sometimes been transposed in the popular imagination to the relationship between a husband and a wife despite the fact that there is little support in the fiqh for the proposition that a wife – by virtue of being a woman or being married – suffers from a legal disability (maḥjūr ʿalayhā) such that she is in need of a guardian (walī) to administer her affairs, be that her husband, father, male relative or a judge.

When the doctrine of qiwāma is assimilated with the concept of wilāya, it seems that it is the outward resemblance between (1) the reciprocal duties of support and obedience that the law of marriage imposes on the husband-wife relationship, and (2) the reciprocal duties immanent in the relationship between a guardian and the one under his care, which is the pathway in the popular imagination through which the husband-wife relationship is reconstituted as one grounded in wilāya, with the husband as the guardian and the wife being placed under his control. This occurred most notoriously in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where women were subject to such rigorous doctrines of guardianship that human rights observers rightly described their condition as that of “perpetual minors.”10

Some topics that would be of interest to the Seminar in this regard include:

9 Fadel, “Fiduciary Principles in Classical Islamic Law Systems,” 543.

10 “Perpetual Minors: Human Rights Abuses Stemming from Male Guardianship and Sex Segregation in Saudi Arabia” (Human Rights Watch, April 19, 2008), https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/04/19/perpetual-minors/human- rights-abuses-stemming-male-guardianship-and-sex.

• Why would jurists deny women the capacity to be a walī of their children, but permit them to be appointed to a functionally identical position, if it was the father who so appointed them? What does this say about conceptions of capacity and family belonging in precolonial Muslim jurisprudential thought?
• Although the husband-wife relationship is not, according to the jurists, grounded in wilāya, are the ethical principles that inform the duties of a guardian in other contexts relevant to understanding the content of the obedience that a wife owes her husband in classical Islamic law? Is the concept of ʿiṣma related to the ethical duties of wilāya and if so, does that tell us something important about the nature of the “property” involved when jurists speak of milk al-nikāḥ?11

5. Guidelines for Papers

Given the breadth of the concept of wilāya in Islamic civilization, we expect papers to cover a broad range of topics, although we expect the legal and the political dimensions of wilāya to be reflected prominently in many of the papers. Authors should not be deterred from participating because this is not a field of their current specialization. Indeed, one of the purposes of this Seminar is to catalyze research on the normative and practical dimensions of this concept and establish an interdisciplinary forum to further our understanding of the various roles this concept played in normative Muslim practices.

Prospective participants are kindly requested to submit the following:

(a) A short abstract (300-500 words), that outlines the key contribution the proposal will make, its sources, and its method, in the light of this Background Paper, and

11 An interesting comparative perspective could be provided by taking into account Kant’s views of marriage, which have been widely criticized, but bear some resemblance to Muslim conceptions of the marriage contract. See, for example, Allan Beever, “Kant on the Law of Marriage,” Kantian Review 18, no. 3 (November 2013): 339–62, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415413000149.

(b) A brief biography (max. 500 words) that includes the academic background of the author, his or her academic publications, and his or her research interests.

Authors whose abstracts are selected to participate in the Seminar will be asked to submit the full paper (7,000 to max. 10,000 words).

Languages

Submissions (abstracts, bios and full papers) can be written in English or Arabic. Simultaneous translation will be available throughout the conference.

Peer-reviewed publication with Brill

After the conference, the full proceedings will undergo a double-blind review process. The papers which will successfully go through this process will be published as a thematic issue in the peer- reviewed Journal of Islamic Ethics (JIE) or an edited volume in the book-series Studies in Islamic Ethics, both published by Brill.

Benefits

CILE will offer the authors of accepted papers the following:

• Peer-reviewed publication
• Covering the costs of making the publication available via open access.
• Travel and accommodation costs during the conference (if the corona virus status remain risky, the conference will be held online).

Important dates

25 June, 2022: Deadline for submitting an abstract and short bio.

25 July, 2022: Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be notified and invited to write the full papers.

01 December 2022: Deadline for submitting the full papers.

10 January, 2023: Authors will be notified about the acceptance (or not) of their full-text papers.

20-23 February, 2023: The proceedings of the seminar will take place in Doha.

Contact us

Submissions should be sent to ayalobaidli@hbku.edu.qa  

Please note that only submissions sent to this e-mail address will be considered.

For any inquiries about this call-for-papers, please contact Dr Mohammad Fadel mohammad.fadel@utoronto.ca  

• Dr. Yasmeen Daifallah (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• Dr. Jason Welle (Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, Rome)
• Dr. F. Redhwan Karim (Markfield Institute Higher Education)
• Dr. Javad Fakhkhar Toosi (University of Toronto)
• Dr. Aiyub Palmer (University of Kentucky)