The Expert Witness in Islamic Courts: Medicine and Crafts in the Service of Law.

• Author: Peters, Rudolph
• Position: Book review

The Expert Witness in Islamic Courts: Medicine and Crafts in the Service of Law. By RON SHAHAM. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2010. Pp. x + 290. $50.

In order to adjudicate, courts use evidence to ascertain the facts before they can apply the law. However, sometimes facts are not obvious and require specialized knowledge to establish them. This is where expert witnesses come in. They not only testify to the readily observable facts but also to their inferences, which they are able to do because of their expertise. Their legal position and the rules to which they are subject vary from one legal system to the other and are clearly informed by cultural assumptions and norms. This is a recurrent theme in this study of the expert witness in Islamic courts.

The book is divided into two parts, each comprising three chapters. In the first the author examines the rules regarding the expert witness in pre-modern Islamic law. He discusses the question of the expert's probative status: is the expert's report regarded as independent evidence or must the rules regarding witnesses be applied? If the latter is the case, this would mean that men and women are treated differently and that at least two Muslim male expert witnesses of good reputation are required to establish a fact. As usual. opinion among the jurists is divided, although even those who require two experts accept the report of a single one in cases of necessity. A special position was reserved for female experts. In general women had a very restricted capacity to give testimony. However, in a patriarchal society there were certain domains of knowledge to which men had no access. such as information on women's bodies and their functions. Since sometimes such information was legally relevant and since it could not be established by male witnesses, female expert witnesses were indispensable. Shaham rightly calls them "agents of patriarchy in a secluded world." They would testify on issues such as virginity, defects in the genital organs that could be a ground for rescission of the marriage, bodily defects in female slaves, pregnancy, childbirth. and the like.

The second part of the study deals with the modern legal system of Egypt, which combines law of Western inspiration with law that has its origins in the Shari'a. To present a comparative perspective, Shaham sketches in chapter four the different positions of expert witnesses in various legal systems. In the following chapter he...