© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156851908X287271 Islamic Law and Society 15 (2008) 1-19 www.brill.nl/ils Islamic Law and Society eme Issue: Shifting Perspectives in the Study of Shari ʿa Courts: Methodologies and Paradigms * Introduction Iris Agmon and Ido Shahar Abstract In this essay, we aim at placing the articles included in this theme issue in the wider context of the field by examining two general questions: First, why has the shariʿa court and its associated socio-legal arena received little scholarly attention until the 1990s? Second, why has this situation changed in the last decade? Until recently, most scholars working in Islamic legal history, social history and legal anthropology were hardly interested in the courts and their legal practices. We argue that this omission was caused by the academic traditions that shaped these three sub-disciplines and that established a division of labor between and among them. In addition, we argue that the recent spike in interest in shariʿa courts in all three sub-disciplines is a result of internal criticism within each field and of broad methodological and epistemological changes in the humanities and social sciences. Keywords shariʿa courts, sijill, historiography, social history, legal history, legal anthropology, methodology Correspondence: Iris Agmon, Department of Middle East Studies, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel. E-mail: iris.agmon@gmail.com Ido Shahar, Post-doctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, e Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. E-mail: idoshah@gmail.com *) We are grateful to David Powers and Aharon Layish for their helpful suggestions and generous assistance in preparing this theme issue. We also thank Ursula Woköck for her invaluable advice.