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

legal procedure was relatively minor. 56 These nuances are crucial to understanding Jews’
experience in sharī‘a courts, especially given the confusion surrounding the testimony of non-
Muslims.
Bills of Debt
To get a better sense of how the Assarrafs used the sharī‘a court, it is necessary to delve
deeper into the business which this family conducted before qāḍī and ‘udūl. As mentioned
above, the Assarrafs turned to the sharī‘a court to notarize legal documents far more often than
for litigious pursuits. A few kinds of notarial documents are especially common in the Assarraf
collection, particularly bills of debt, contracts for the rent or sale of property, and releases; their
abundance indicates that these were the kinds of transactions which most frequently brought the
Assarrafs to the sharī‘a court.
Bills of debt constitute the majority of notarial documents in the collection (about 64% of
the total). The preponderance of bills of debt was not limited to the Assarrafs. Among the other
sharī‘a court documents I examined, about 52% were also bills of debt. 57 It was in Jews’ interest
to notarize their bills of debt with ‘udūl because contracts which conformed to Islamic legal
standards were far more likely to be considered authoritative in case of litigation. As we will see
shortly, qāḍīs consistently demanded legal proof of claims made in court, which essentially
meant documents notarized by ‘udūl. In the event that a debtor did not repay his debts, the
56 As will be discussed further below, the testimony of a lafīf was almost always used to prove that a recalcitrant
debtor was bankrupt and thus unable to pay his debts; since Jews were rarely indebted to Muslims, they more rarely
needed the services of a lafīf. Of course, it is possible that lafīfs are relatively rare in the Assarraf collection
precisely because Jews were unable to testify in them, and thus resorted to their use more infrequently than did
Muslims. Only further research in collections of sharī‘a court documents belonging to Muslim families will answer
this question definitively.
57 That is, 154 out of 295.
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