ABSTRACT

Periodization and framing, of course, are key features of any historical narrative. The story of the Israeli shari‘a court in West Jerusalem as I choose to tell it, begins 30 years before its establishment, and involves complex and multi-faceted relations with several other legal institutions. Of these institutions, the most important one, undoubtedly, is a shari‘a court run by the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf, that continues to operate in East Jerusalem until this very day. The ongoing interrelations between the Israeli and the Jordanian shari‘a courts will be examined more systematically in Chapter 12. Here I will discuss how the very fact that a “foreign” shari‘a court was functioning in occupied East Jerusalem, played a major role in the decision to establish a rival Israeli court in West Jerusalem.