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Matthew Lippman, Sean McConville, and Mordechai Yerushalmi, Islamic Criminal Law and Procedure: An Introduction (New York: Praeger, 1988). Pp. 168.

This volume seeks to fill the need for a presentation of the fundamentals of Islamic criminal law that would be comprehensible to the nonspecialist student. Two of the authors are professors at an American law school and have no background in Islamic studies; the third has a degree in Middle East and Islamic history and is said to be fluent in Arabic, though given the haphazard and inconsistent transcriptions in this book, one must conclude that he had no role in the proofreading. If a book such as this has a justification, it is that Islamic specialists have failed to provide material in criminal law that is understandable to the general reader who requires the condensed background on the origin and development of Islam and on Islamic law in general that is provided in the first two chapters of this book, and who is bound to be more interested in Western questions about Islamic criminal law than in Islamic discourse on the subject. The most important subject the book takes up is how Islamic law protects the rights of the accused, thanks to its exacting rules of proof and rejection of circumstantial evidence and confessions acquired by coercion or threats. This is not simply a case of finding modern American legal principles in a foreign tradition. Islamic legal scholars long ago recognized this phenomenon and as a result came up with ways to bypass the sharia through the application of discretionary punishments and the establishment of secular jurisdictions to see to the needs of public security. The authors are quite right to emphasize the protection of the rights of the accused under Islamic law, but they do not fully pursue its ramifications. To do so, they would need to abandon legal theory and study legal practice in various Muslim societies, past and present, a difficult task given the sparseness of English-language literature in this area. One important ramification touched on briefly in the book is the lack of protection for victim's rights, a problem compounded by the unequal treatment Islamic law affords to women, slaves, and non-Muslims. The difficulty of prosecuting theft under Islamic law had also not infrequently contributed to a culture of self-help in dealing with thieves, who, if caught, are beaten on the spot, rather than taken to court. Islamic law contributes to this in condoning violence against the muharib, or brigand. Given their concern with strict rules of proof, the authors too briefly treat the qasama (rendered in the book as quesama) oath. In Maliki law, this is a shared fiftyfold oath taken by two of the victim's male agnates in cases where guilt has not been proven by testimony or confession, but where there are grounds for presumption of guilt. The qasama oath covers two different problems: whether the accused indeed committed the act alleged, and whether that act was the cause of death. In societies where knives, clubs, and fists, rather than submachine guns, were the usual weapons, the latter question was common. Inevitably, there is a degree of arbitrariness in qasama cases, since the judge must exercise discretion in whether to invoke it, and since victims who lack two male agnates ready to testify cannot benefit from it. The authors consider no such details, and in fact fail to indicate that the "fifty-fold oath," discussed on pages 70-71 is the same thing as the qasama oath, covered on page 72. The problem is not simply one of how well the authors understand Islamic law, but of how Islamic law should be studied. Can we fully understand it just by examining the texts of the law—whether in the original or as distilled by a few Anglophone scholars? Or do we need to examine the law in its context by studying the day-to-day functioning of the courts, either directly or through their records?