It's the Tribes (merged thread)

[jmm99]

from tribalguy (my emphasis added)
As for actually incorporating tribal law, that gets into two questions.

The first question that our academic friends like to ask is 'what is and was the effect of Islam on the tribes?' And from there we can extrapolate that there was an effect, and that it influenced tribal law in some way. This extrapolation might be correct in some cases, and in others it might not.

The next question, which is taboo in most circles and quite un-PC is "What effect did tribalism have on Islam?" The answers to this question require a translation of tribal laws - which vary by tribe and even sub-tribe. It's a vast subject area, and I'm not sure how to approach that one. It's too big of a job for me - I've got my hands full with other things. And, the inference, which I think rings true, is that tribal law is represented to some extent and perhaps standardized in the shari'a. Now, that is conjecture on my part, but there's a lot of laws in the shari'a that sound rather tribal to me. Eye for an eye, God permits the marriage of cousins, and others.

The bottom line is that you don't know and I don't know. Knowing would require knowledge of the tribal laws pre-Islam and those same laws as they developed after the Islamic Conquest. What tribal laws are or are not today is many centuries removed from the probative evidence.

"Eye for eye, etc." laws (that is, in codified form) go back well before Islam; e.g., as in rough chrono order: Hammurabi's Code of Laws; The Code of the Nesilim; The Code of the Assura; Some Neo-Babylonian Legal Decisions. Then come the Persians (in several imperial iterations).

What effect did prior formal laws (and informal tribal laws) have on the Persian legal system - and it on the Islamic legal system that developed in the hinterland of the former Persian empire ? Many possible feedback loops, proof of which would require evidence contemporary to the loops.

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Leaving aside issues of historical comparative law (which are not about to be resolved here), I do have a current events question: What is your opinion about the link between the Iraqi Al-Sadrs, from a tribal standpoint (if any), to Hez in Lebanon ?

PS: I punched your blog link in this post - it didn't work for me just now.