In memoriam: Jeanette Wakin August 2, 1928-March 13, 1998.

• Author: Lassner, Jacob
• Position: Islamic editor of the Journal of the American Oriental Society - Obituary

These remarks were read by President Stanley Insler at the plenary meeting of the American Oriental Society, New Orleans, March 31, 1998.

A sudden and unexpected illness prevents me from attending this year's meeting of the Society. With your permission, I hope that I might still be allowed to say a few words, albeit in absentia, concerning Jeanette Wakin, one of my most beloved friends, who died on March 13. She was an extraordinary individual whose personal and professional life was intertwined with my own for some forty years. Put somewhat differently, we were very close throughout our student and scholarly careers. Recovering from open heart surgery has a way of dulling words and draining psychic energies. Were circumstances otherwise, I might have been able to occasion more felicitous language; I trust, nevertheless, that the gist of my deep admiration for Jeanette, an admiration which I share with so many others, orientalists and non-orientalists alike, will be self-evident.

I'll touch only briefly on Jeanette's scholarship; others are more qualified to comment about her work in Islamic law. She was superbly trained by the doyen of Islamic legal scholars in this century, the late Joseph Schacht, an individual of remarkable integrity and impeccable scholarly standards, both of which served as a guide to his serious students. Her doctoral dissertation on notarial documents, which was later transformed into a monograph, remains some three decades after completion a model of scholarship on Islamic law. Some students, released from the bonds of their doctoral advisors, incline to less-taxing intellectual enterprises. Jeanette sought a massive new project: the translation and analysis of Ibn Qudamah's Rawdat al-Nazir wa-jannat al-munazir, a massive and densely written compendium of legal material that demands a lifetime of effort. With her untimely death, the project remains uncompleted. In her most recent inquiries, she turned to arcane documents which reveal the role of Muslim judges (qadi), showing how judges were able to exercise a reasonable degree of personal discretion in making decisions, despite a cut-and-dried law of procedure and evidence. It was her contention that these documents had probative value even for a second judge succeeding in his post; and that the detailed discussions of theoretical questions pervading the text were to help judges render unassailable judgments, thus preserving the integrity of the judicial system.

...