For more than a millennium, fatwas have guided and shaped Muslim understandings of Islamic law. The whole world knows of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in the Salman Rushdie case, yet this key institution in Muslim society has not been the subject of a major examination until now.

Ranging in import from the routine to the revolutionary, and in form from one-line answers to short treatises, fatwas have served to reaffirm received wisdom, caution against error, and chart novel responses to changing circumstances. The interpreters, the muftis of Islam, have included the greatest independent scholars of the ages, heads of large state bureaucracies, and unassuming jurists in local districts. Their vital task, which continues today in published collections as well as on radio and television, is to strive to interpret God’s design for the Muslim community.

Islamic Legal Interpretation uses an approach unique in Islamic studies, a casebook of expert analyses of fatwas from a wide range of times and places. The editors’ first chapter sets forth the origins, classical diversity, and modern development of the fatwa, while the following chapters illustrate particular opinions and their contexts. The approach throughout is interdisciplinary, as historians, lawyers, language specialists, and social scientists address fatwas as fundamental sources on both Islamic legal thought and Islamic social history.

It is often said that marriage in Islamic law is a civil contract, not a sacrament. If this is so, this means that the marriage contract is largely governed by the same rules as other contracts, such as sale or hire. But at the same time marriage is a profound concern of the Islamic scriptures of Qur’an and Sunna, and thus at the very core of the law and morality of Islam and of the individual, familial, and social life of Muslims. This volume collects papers from many disciplines examining the Muslim marriage contract. Articles cover doctrines as to marriage contracts (e.g., may a wife stipulate monogamy?); historical instances (e.g., legal advice from thirteenth-century Spain); comparisons with Jewish and canon law; contemporary legal and social practice; and projects of activists for women worldwide.

Demonstrating a new and powerful focus for comparative and historical inquiries into Islamic law and social practices, this book marks a fresh point of departure for the study of Muslim women.

We are culturally conditioned to think of war and peace in binary terms of strict opposition. Correspondingly, we tend to focus our attention on conflict prevention or conflict resolution. But as Islands of Agreement demonstrates, peace and war are seldom polar totalities but increasingly can and do coexist within the confines of a single scenario.

Consequently, Gabriella Blum suggests that even where conflict exists, we regard it as only one dimension of an ongoing, multifaceted interstate relationship. The result is a shift in perspective away from the constricting notions of "prevention" or "resolution" toward a more holistic approach of relationship management.

This approach is especially pertinent because conflicts cannot always be prevented or resolved. Through case studies of long-enduring rivalries--India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey, Israel and Lebanon--Blum shows how international law and politics can function in the battlefield and in everyday life, forming a hybrid international relationship.

Through a strategy she calls "islands of agreement," Blum argues that within the most entrenched and bitter struggles, adversaries can carve out limited areas that remain safe or even prosperous amid a tide of war. These havens effectively reduce suffering and loss and allow mutually beneficial exchanges to take place, offering hope for broader accords.

Everyone worries about privacy these days. As corporations and governments devise increasingly sophisticated data gathering tools and joining Facebook verges on obligatory, concerns over the use and abuse of personal information are undeniable. But the way privacy functions on the virtual frontier of the Internet is only a subset of the fascinating ways we work to achieve it throughout our everyday lives. In Islands of Privacy, Christena Nippert-Eng pries open the blinds, giving us an intimate view into the full range of ordinary people’s sometimes extraordinary efforts to preserve the border between themselves and the rest of the world.

Packed with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, Islands of Privacy tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won. Nippert-Eng explores how we manage our secrets, our phone calls and e-mail, the perimeters of our homes, and our interactions with neighbors. She discovers that everybody practices the art of selectively concealing and disclosing information on a daily basis. This important balancing act governs a wide range of behaviors, from deciding whether to give our bosses our cell phone numbers to choosing what we carry in our wallets or purses. Violations of privacy and anxiety about how we grant it to each other also come under Nippert-Eng’s microscope as she crafts a compelling argument that successfully managing privacy is critical for successfully maintaining our relationships with each other and our selves.

Roaming from the beach to the bank and from the bathroom to the bus, Nippert-Eng’s keenly observed and vividly told book gives us the skinny on how we defend our shrinking islands of privacy in the vast ocean of accessibility that surrounds us.