ABSTRACT
This chapter examines legal practice in the urban society of nineteenth-century Iran. It investigates how Islamic law was executed and how it affected urban society. The chapter focuses on the court system and the vaqf, or the Islamic pious endowment. The setting is Tehran, the capital city of Qajar Iran. Instead of analyzing political discourse, this chapter is based on archival sources and describes nineteenth-century Iran from the perspective of social history, examining the relationship between modernity and Islam from a legal perspective. The Iranian government had already begun judicial reform in the nineteenth century, and reform raised the same question that persists today about relationship of modern institutions with shari‘a. The most important of the Persian documents that form the basis for this chapter are the shari‘a court registers found and/or published. It is difficult to understand the entire function of the shari‘a courts from individual documents because the documents are concerned with individual cases.
