IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

‘udūl testified to something based on their personal knowledge. 44 This sort of testimony was
commonly used in proving that a debtor was destitute, as discussed below. If Jews wanted to
make use of a lafīf as evidence in a sharī‘a court, they had to gather twelve Muslim men who
would testify on their behalf. It is likely that this requirement put Jews at something of a
disadvantage since Muslims could more easily muster Muslim friends and relatives to participate
in a lafīf. 45 Nonetheless, this challenge was not insurmountable. Shalom Assarraf used a lafīf as
evidence at least once; in a lawsuit against Aḥmad b. ‘Abd al-Jalīl al-Qamrī, Shalom produced a
lafīf of twelve Muslim men who testified thus: “About a month ago, [Aḥmad] obligated himself
to [Shalom to pay a debt] for his wife (‘an zawjatihi) Zaynab b. Mulūk al-Qamrī al-Bashīshī for
what she guaranteed to [Shalom] for her brothers Idrīs and Bū Sitta.” 46 The qāḍī apparently
accepted the validity of this lafīf since he ruled that Aḥmad had to find someone else to
guarantee the loan that he, as guarantor, owed to Shalom. 47
Moreover, the fact that Jews could not serve as ‘udūl or as witnesses in a lafīf did not
mean that Jews’ testimony was by definition unacceptable in a sharī‘a court. Jews—and in fact
non-Muslims generally—were eligible to take the judicial oath concerning the facts of a case. 48
This is clearly documented in studies of the medieval period and the early modern Ottoman
44
Santillana, Istituzioni di diritto musulmano malichita, v. 2, 603. Although twelve was the standard number for a
lafīf, it was possible to have more or less. For a discussion about whether the testimony of six witnesses counted as
a lafīf, see the fatwā in TC, File #5, lawsuit beginning on 17 Rabī‘ II 1291. However, see also a lafīf in which only
six Muslims testified, but which does not seem to have been contested: File #5, 15 Muḥarram 1291.
45
Many of the lafīf documents I found recorded the testimony of twelve men who were related to one another (this
was noted by the word “al-nasab” (the relation) after the witnesses’ names: see, e.g., TC, File #5, lafīf from 18 Rabī‘
II 1291 and File #10, 23 Sha‘bān 1294). Undoubtedly these kinship ties made it much easier to find twelve men to
bear testimony, and put Muslims at an advantage over Jews when it came to employing lafīf testimony.
46
TC, File #1, 1 Rabī‘ I 1297.
47
This is from an entry on the same page dated 19 Rabī‘ I 1297.
48
See, for instance, Robert Brunschvig, Etudes d’islamologie, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose,
1976), 211-12; Christopher Melchert, “The History of the Judicial Oath in Islamic Law,” in Oralité et lien social au
Moyen Age (Occident, Byzance, Islam) : parole donnée, foi jurée, serment, ed. Marie-France Auzépy and Guillaume
Saint-Guillain (Paris: Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilization de Byzance, 2008), 311-12. Even nonmonotheists
seem to have been able to take the oath: see Sadik Abbas Alhaji, “The Oath in the Procedure of Shari‘a
Tribunals,” Journal of the Centre of Islamic Legal Studies 1, no. 1 (1980): 30.
82