In this excerpt from his biographical dictionary of Egyptian judges, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī notes that Ibn Jabr, a fourth/tenth-century Egyptian judge, used to hold court on street corners by simply laying out a carpet and forming a gathering around it. In his chapter comparing earthly justice with heavenly justice in the early Islamic imagination in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Christian Lange uses this example to call attention to the indeterminate nature of the spatial organization of the judge’s court in the early centuries of Islam. He further notes that not much can be gleaned from the sources about the places in which the early judges held court.
This source is part of the Online Companion to the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, ed. Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale(ILSP/HUP 2017)—a collection of primary sources and other material used in and related to the book.