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

136 r Mark S. Wagner

was a philosophical position regarding the boundaries between Muslim
and non-Muslim law. This position relies upon the strict separation of the
two. Here, the impetus to keep in place the judicial separation of dhimmīs
seems to derive less from an “intention to maintain the autonomy of the
Jewish courts,” as Gideon Libson defines it, than from the intention to
maintain the divine nature of Islamic law.^55 Jewish law was the domain of
unbelief. The Muslim state permits Jews to engage in such unbelief. This,
after all, is what makes them Jews. If Muslim jurists were to rule on dis-
crete substantive issues within Judaism, such as the status of synagogues
as property within Jewish law, they risk sliding down a slippery slope.
They would be charged with using the legal process to Islamicize Judaism,
eventually breaking down the social distinctions between the Muslim ma-
jority and the Jewish minority.
Thus, from this perspective, Jewish law is what responsible Jews say it
is. Attempting to determine whether a particular Jew was acting in accor-
dance with Jewish law would constitute another slippery slope, whereby
the interpreters of divine law (Sharī ̔ah) become involved in the study and
application of a legal tradition that has lost its divine mandate (halakhah).
Ironically, whereas on a theoretical level this stance dismisses Jewish law
and, by extension, Judaism, on a practical level it allows a great deal of
flexibility to Muslims and Jews who routinely come into contact with each
other in legal settings. Nevertheless, no matter how great the imagined
gulf separating Jewish law from Sharī ̔ah, Imām Yahyā still found himself
ruling on parochial questions such as whether or not Jews could study the
Zohar.^56
It is precisely within such an interpretational scheme that termino-
logical sleight of hand, such as the translation of the Hebrew heqdesh (pi-
ous endowment) as ibāhah, fills a needed function. This position, while
maintaining the supremacy of Islamic law, defends Jewish law by default.
It even defends, and may indeed rely upon, cunning legal devices made
by Jews. It is also important to note that in exercising his legal reasoning,
the Zaydī imām was charged with evaluating the benefit (maslahah) to his
Muslim and Jewish subjects. A radical overhaul of Judaism by Muslims
surely would prove destabilizing to both parties and, more importantly,
would blur the boundaries between them.
The Yemeni judges Lutf al-Zubayrī, Husayn al- ̔Amrī, and other mem-
bers of the judicial apparatus took an activist stance toward combating