The Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shiite Islam project (LAWALISI) aimed to reformulate, in a fundamental way, current academic research on Islamic law and its institutions. Understanding the intellectual structure and the operation of the Islamic legal system has emerged as a major research focus in the 20th and 21st centuries. Muslim movements usually include a call for a restoration of the Sharīʿa as a key element of their programme of political and religious change, revealing how central this idea is to Muslim identity and belief through history. Much research to date focuses solely on Sunni Muslim legal developments. The project challenged this general tendency in the field by producing a series of advanced research publications and a focusses research database (Twelver Usul Bibliography) in which the contribution of one non-Sunni tradition of legal thought, Shiʿite jurisprudence (specifically Imāmī or Twelver Shīʿī jurisprudence), was presented as integrated into the general account of the development of Islamic legal thought.
The major contribution to society was a deeper understanding of Islamic law, which is associated with terms such as Sharia. This term is used widely and inaccurately in the media and in popular discourse. One of the aims of the project was to challenge the way in which Sharia is talked about in popular discourse by complicating the term. Many think it is simple - in fact Islamic law is extremely complex and varied. Many think it is monolithic - in fact, as the study of Imami Shi’i law and the LAWALISI project demonstrates, it is diverse and multiple.
In the project, we examined the theories and methods used by scholars in the study of Islamic law, derived mainly from Sunni sources, and tested them against the Shi’ite legal literature. The project demonstrated that a non-Sunni tradition of Islamic legal thought, in this case Imami Shi’i law, can illuminate and enrich the general history of Islamic law. At times, Shi'ite law shares features with other legal schools; at other times it provides an alternative account, challenging long held assumptions concerning Islam’s legal development. One of the project’s achievements was to demonstrate to the wider field that scholarship on Islamic law is significantly enriched by greater scholarly recognition of the contribution of non-Sunni legal traditions to the formation, history and development of Islamic legal thought. By demonstrating the contribution made by the Shīʿī jurists (particularly those of the Imāmī (Twelver) Shīʿī school) to the development of Islamic legal scholarship, the project has, we hope, has a lasting effect on the academic study of the Muslim legal tradition. in particular, the project examined the specific areas of:
(i) ideas concerning the formation of the Islamic legal schools
(ii) the relationship between legal theory and legal doctrine
(iii) the purpose of the legal commentary and the phenomenon of legal change,
In each of these areas, the scholarship was dominated by Sunni sources - this project has, we feel, adjusted this, and in future research, a wider range of sources will be used by researchers.
