ABSTRACT
Throughout my fieldwork, gaining access to the research sites was a challenging task. As mentioned, I initially intended to conduct fieldwork in the Jordanian shari‘a court in East Jerusalem. Although Israeli scholars were allowed in the past to study the archive of the East Jerusalem shari‘a court, 1 I discovered that getting permission to conduct participant observations is much more difficult. I made numerous attempts to contact the court’s “gatekeepers” (the qadi al-quda, and the chief scribe), but I was rejected again and again by dodging and evasion. Even appeals made on my behalf by Prof. Layish and Dr Reiter of the Hebrew University did not yield results. 2 I therefore settled, eventually, for the Israeli shari‘a court in West Jerusalem. In retrospect, however, this proved to be for the best, since it appears that the Israeli court is currently of much more importance in the lives of Jerusalemite Palestinians than the Jordanian court.
