Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany are working with their counterparts at the French research centre CNRS to create a database of historic legal Arabic documents from all over the Arabic-speaking world.

The project, Islamic Law Materialized, was officially launched in 2009 and is set to run into 2014. It is headed by Christian Muller from CNRS.

The documents, dating from the 8th to the 12th century AD, are legal documents issues by courts, includes contracts of purchase, estate inventories, debt acknowledgments, marriage certificates, and divorce decrees.

“By compiling these texts into a database, we’ll be able to collate them with one another so that we can understand them even better,” said Johannes Pahlitzsch,a Byzantine and Arabic Studies expert from JGU. These legal documents often have phrases that are repeated across several documents. By having them all in one database, these phrases can easily be identified, collected and compared to other documents.

Most of what we scholars know about legal practice in the Middle Age Arabic-speaking world has come from legal manuals and juridical treaties. Other documents were neglected because the handwriting and technical terms often made them hard to decipher and they were widespread over several states, making them hard to collect and analyse.

“But, thanks to the database, we will be able to analyze the exact provisions of the decrees and make comparisons between them,” adds Pahlitzsch. “This will give us a much better idea of actual practices.”

Most of the ancient documents that are going into the database are collected from Christian institutes, mainly churches and monasteries. The scholars are collecting both edited and as yet unedited documents.

The research group will compare three under-examined corpuses from al-Andalus, Egypt and Palestine from the 13th to the 15th century, and compare these to other edited documents from Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Muslim Spain (8th-15th centuries).