TraIL. Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions

The Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions (TraIL) project aims at providing cutting-edge research on the legal history of labour in Islamicate societies in a longue durée perspective (from the 10th to the 20th century), with a special focus on the relation between labour and gender in Islamicate legal traditions. TraIL is the first attempt to write a legal history of labour in Islamicate contexts, systematically bringing together scholarship on labour, gender studies and the study of law in Islamicate societies.TraIL aims at diversifying our understanding of labour in Islamic legal sources while applying methods not yet applied in Islamic legal studies. Theoretically, the project is built on two pillars: 1. Global Labour History, an approach in labour history that has shown the need to reassess labour history to include perspectives from the Global South and 2. Semantics of Labour, which refers to the investigation of how labour-related practices were named and designated by Muslim jurists. Methodologically, the project will draw on historical discourse analysis, a method based upon the work of Michel Foucault and described by Achim Landwehr (2018). In addition to that, TraIL will use Digital Humanities tools.The project’s specific objectives are: 1. To identify the terms used in Arabic jurisprudential sources and legal documents to refer to labour and to trace their varying meanings in different historical periods with a regional focus on Egypt and Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria, a region roughly corresponding to the modern countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Palestine); 2. To reconstruct the patterns of argument and terminology in the history of Islamic legal discourses on labour; 3. To uncover the relation between gender and labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions, reconstructing in particular discussions on women’s labour.