| For the past century scholars have been studying privacy and the private sphere in the context of many societies. Surprisingly, no scholar has yet undertaken a comprehensive study of privacy as manifest in Islam. In this dissertation I argue that Muslim scholars had a notion of what contemporary thinkers call "privacy," and that they used law to safeguard it. Focusing on exegetical and legal sources composed between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, the dissertation delineates the private sphere as perceived by Muslim scholars, traces its historical evolution through the centuries, and develops a theory of the essence of privacy as manifest in early Islamic thought.;In addition, this dissertation offers an innovative approach to the analysis of issues in Islamic jurisprudence that have been deemed, until now, to be unrelated. The dissertation proposes a conceptual framework within which legal discussions of matters such as individuality, property, loyalty, sexual modesty, and personal reputation come together as manifestations of an ongoing discourse about privacy. The dissertation suggests that, taken as a whole, these diverse debates about seemingly discrete legal matters reflect a complex understanding of the role of law and its purveyors in Islamic communities.;The dissertation categorizes and analyzes extant source material in accordance with the salient spheres of privacy created and protected by Islamic law. Among the prominent realms of privacy the dissertation addresses are the domestic private sphere, privacy of information, and the private sphere created by regulations pertaining to physical modesty. |
