Bauer (Karen), Fatemi (Mohammed), Gleave (Robert), Stewart Devin J. eds., Regulative Verses of the Qurʾan: From Historical Trends to Contemporary Trajectories, Leiden, Brill, 2026, 500 p. ISBN 978-90-04-75555-0

Editors

Karen Bauer is Associate Professor at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. Her research focuses on the Qur’an and its interpretation. Her books include Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses (Cambridge: 2015), An Anthology of Qur’anic Commentaries: On Women (co-authored with Feras Hamza, Oxford, 2021); Women, Households and the Hereafter in the Qur’an (Oxford, 2023, co-authored with Feras Hamza), and she has also written numerous articles.

Seyed Mohammad Ghari Seyed Fatemi, Ph.D. (1999), is Professor of Comparative Human Rights and Islamic Studies at AMI and Mofid University. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Shahid Beheshti University and the University of Birmingham. Professor Fatemi has published several monographs and numerous scholarly articles.

Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK. He researches the history of Shīʿī law, with a particular interest in legal hermeneutics. He is author of Inevitable Doubt: Two Shīʿī Theories of Jurisprudence (Brill, 2000), Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbārī Shīʿī School (Brill, 2007), Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning in Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory (EUP, 2012).

Devin J. Stewart, Ph.D. (1991), is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Emory University. He has published many studies on the history Shiism, the Qur’an, and other topics.

Presentation

Why does the Qurʾan contain legal verses, and how have scholars interpreted them across the centuries? Regulative Verses of the Qurʾan offers a comprehensive study of how Islamic law emerged from scriptural interpretation, by exploring the nature of law in the Qur’an itself and in Islamic thought, including in the foundational yet often overlooked genre of aḥkām al-Qurʾān. Through detailed analysis of classical and contemporary texts, the volume reveals how jurists across Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi traditions have debated the meaning, scope, and application of legal verses. Drawing on rare primary sources and philosophical perspectives this book is an essential resource, illuminating the rich interplay between divine revelation, legal reasoning, and ethical inquiry in Islam. See Less

Table of contents

Introduction: Regulative Verses of the Qurʾan: From Historical Trends to Contemporary Trajectories
Seyed Mohammad G. S. Fatemi, Karen Bauer, Robert Gleave, and Devin J. Stewart

Part 1 The Qurʾan, Ethics, and Law

1 Towards a Prehistory of Islamic Law: The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qurʾan
Holger Zellentin
2 The Place of Divine Law in the Qurʾan’s Moral Theology
Nicolai Sinai
3 Qurʾanic Morality as Qurʾanic Law
Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza
4 The Myth of the Elite Male Addressee and Its Implications for Regulative Verses
Abla Hasan
5 On the Universality of Divine Commands versus the Casuistic Interpretation of the Regulative Verses
Gholamreza Aavani

Part 2 The Historical Genre of Aḥkām al-Qurʾān

6 Legal Hermeneutics and Religious Authority in Kitāb Aḥkām al-Qurʾān by al-Jaṣṣāṣ al-Rāzī (d. 370/981)
Devin J. Stewart
7 The Imāmī Reception of the Qurʾan’s Regulative Verses (Āyāt al-Aḥkām)
Seyed Mohammad G. S. Fatemi and Syed Wajee ul-Hasan Shah

Part 3 Interpretation of Regulative Verses

8 Āyāt al-Aḥkām in Early Ibāḍī Thought
Nora K. Schmid
9 The Irrelevance of ‘Qurʾanic Meaning’: Akhbārī Shīʿī Interpretive Techniques and the Legal Verses of the Qurʾan
Robert Gleave
10 Arguments for Conditional Variability of Ḥudūd Punishments
M. Ashraf Adeel
11 Metaphysical and Legal Implications of the Earliest Instance of Āyāt al-Aḥkām: The Prophet Muḥammad’s Spiritual Journey in Light of the Obligatory Nature of the Night Prayer Vigil (Ṣalāt al-Layl) in Sūrat al-Muzzammil
Imranali Panjwani

Part 4 Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives

12 Making Sense of Obligatory Faith in the Qurʾan
Hamid Vahid
13 A Decision-Theoretical Approach to the Ḥujjiyya of Regulative Qurʾanic Verses
Mahmoud Morvarid
14 The Existential Perspective on the Regulative Verses (Āyāt al-Aḥkām) of the Qurʾan
Arif Abdul Hussain

Part 5 Contemporary Legal and Ethical Trajectories

15 Rules and Rituals in the Qurʾan: Is There a Role for Reasons?
Oliver Leaman
16 Reconstruction of Sharīʿa through Judicial Ijtihād: Inheritance Rights of Childless Widows under the Ithnā ʿAshariyya School in Pakistan
Muhammad Zubair Abbasi
17 ‘Do Not Prohibit the Good Things That God Has Made Lawful to You’ (Q. 5:87): Ethical Vegetarianism in Islam and Beyond
Sarra Tlili
18 ‘Clear’ Verses of the Qurʾan (Āyāt al-Aḥkām) and Environmental Ethics
Etin Anwar