A Reality, an Idea, a Colonial Legacy by Dr Valentino CattelanEdutalk
Birmingham City University online
Speaker
Dr Valentino Cattelan. Valentino Cattelan holds a PhD in Law & Economics (University of Siena, Italy). He is currently module leader for Contract Law at BCU. His research interests include comparative law, EU law, contract law and financial law – with specific reference to the Islamic legal tradition. On the matter he has recently published the monograph ‘ Religion and Contract Law in Islam: From Medieval Trade to Global Finance’ (Routledge, 2024). He is passionate about the nature of market relations, property rights and the theory of legal comparison. He has broad teaching experience at an international level, with academic positions held in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the UK and Turkey. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Description
This seminar explores the meaning of Islamic law as a social/cultural construct that bears the patina of Western culture in representing the legal reality(-ies) of Muslim civilizations. By looking at this concept at the intersection of convergent paths (the revelation of the Qur’an; the construction of fiqh, the ‘understanding’ of Shariah as specific legal tradition; the transformation of legal praxis in the context of Muslim societies), ‘Islamic law’ will be investigated as a mutable idea, whose transcendental reality (God’s Message according to Muslim legal theology) necessarily relates to overlapping layers of meaning in its empirical application – and, ultimately, to the impact of Western coloniality in shaping the present normativity of Muslim countries. From this elaboration, a more critical approach towards the notion of ‘Islamic law’ will be advanced also in the light of framework of decoloniality.