The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

8

Halakhah through the Lens of Sharī ̔ah

The Case of the Kuhlānī Synagogue in San ̔ā’, 1933–1944

Mark S. Wagner

In 1935, Jews in San ̔ā’, embroiled in a dispute over the leadership of the
Jewish community in Yemen, sought the legal ruling of the Zaydī imām,
Yahyā b. Muhammad Hamīd al-Dīn, on whether the Kuhlānī Synagogue
was private property or a pious endowment (waq f). The status of the syna-
gogue as property would strengthen the position of one of two factions
within the Jewish community. Depending on the outcome, one faction
might become dominant in all of the synagogues in the city. The acrimony
that ensued between Muslim jurists over the imām’s ruling brought into
sharp focus the divisions between them regarding the status of Jewish
law and the interaction of Islamic and Jewish legal systems and raised the
following questions: What is non-Muslim law, and what is its relevance
to the Muslim jurist? Should Jews be permitted to commit acts that are
illegal in Islamic law if they do not bring them to the attention of a Mus-
lim court? More broadly, are non-Muslim legal systems legitimate as legal
systems?
With the Kuhlānī Synagogue dispute as a case study, we outline the
varied and conflicting solutions that Muslim jurists in Yemen devised to
respond to these questions using Zaydī sources and legal documents from
the early twentieth century. The case of the Kuhlānī Synagogue is special
in that it forced Muslim jurists to decide what happened when Jews did
something that was legal in Judaism but illegal under Islamic law.^1 More-
over, it forced Muslim jurists to rule on a substantive issue of Jewish law.