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

The Case of the Kuhlānī Synagogue in San ̔ā’, 1933–1944 r 137

illegality in the Jewish community. In the case of the synagogues contro-
versy, this involved addressing the halakhic issue of the status of syna-
gogues in property law. While all would agree that Islamic law negates
Jewish law, in this case it mattered to them what type of property Jews
believed synagogues to be. Thus their view of Jewish law can be said to be
sympathetic: from this vantage point Jewish law is a reflection of Islamic
law. The episode in which the judge Husayn Abū Tālib, after listening to
R. al-Jamal’s exposition of the Talmud and Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah,
said that Jews surely must possess a law of waq fs (he was correct) encap-
sulates this perspective on the division between Islamic and Jewish law.
Why must Jewish law possess a law of waq fs? The qādī’s assumption is that
Jewish law is fundamentally rational—it must agree with Islamic law or
else be made to do so. Thus the claim of ibāhah, rooted in the dissimilarity
between the two legal systems, is suspect.
Conflicts between the Sharī ̔ah and Jewish law may also be the result
of Jews incorrectly characterizing the content of halakhah or deliberately
misleading Muslims about it (as happened in the case of R. al-Jamal).
In this context we note that none of the Muslim jurists discussed here
advocated an independent review of the sources of Jewish law. It was the
testimony of Jews in Arabic that was the source of information on it.
The documentation of the 1930s synagogues controversy also shows
the multiplicity of historically contingent factors that informed the ap-
plication of Islamic law. The documents also shed light on the role of
personal relationships in the synagogues controversy. There seems little
reason to doubt the authenticity of either the mutual antipathy between
R. al-Jamal and members of the Islamic judiciary or his connection with
Imām Yahyā. The imām, after all, was unsympathetic to change in the lives
of the inhabitants of San ̔ā’.^57 One factor that contributed to his decision to
support the reformist Jewish faction may be that his aide, R. Sālim Sa ̔īd
al-Jamal, was affiliated with that faction.
The judicial politics of San ̔ā’ in the early twentieth century played an
important role in the synagogues controversy. By Imām Yahyā’s time a
judicial bureaucracy that was ideologically oriented toward Sunnī Tradi-
tionism had developed to the point that the Zaydī ideal of “the informed
decision of the Imām of the Age” (ijtihād imām al-zamān) had become an
impediment. R. al-Jamal goes so far as to suggest that the imām’s unpopu-
lar affirmation of the “public property” legal ruse in the controversy over