Mission Statement

The Electronic Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law (EJIMEL) is a publication by the Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Legal Studies (CIMELS) at the Faculty of Law, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in mid-2012, EJIMEL provides a forum for the discussion of legal issues as well as associated political, social, cultural and philosophical topics relating to the Middle East and Islamic world. The journal welcomes timely and original scholarship on Middle Eastern Law, Islamic law, and related topics.

The Muslim world is rich in diversity and heritage, and the body of laws and legal norms in Islamic jurisdictions is huge. With due consideration of the plurality of thought, custom and application of law within Muslim-majority communities, the journal lays a special focus on the multifaceted relations between Islam and national and international law orders over the course of time and from different points of view. EJIMEL also aims to contribute to the on-going highly topical debates of regional and global interest in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, such as, e.g., Democratization, Family, Gender, Human Rights, Constitutional Law, and Islamic legal theory, and to highlight interdependencies of Middle Eastern law orders with other jurisdictions worldwide.

The editors aim is to foster a vivid debate focusing on the correlation between Islam as a religion with a distinct body of legal norms and the paramount principles and guarantees of current international law, as well as to inquire into key phenomena in Muslim-majority law orders such as, e.g., “Re-Islamisation”, which have influenced both codifications and scholarly discourse in a significant way. We explicitly encourage both junior and senior researchers as well as legal practitioners to take part in this discourse by submitting papers dealing with Middle Eastern and Islamic law from a variety of perspectives, and hence in line with Islam’s variety itself.

The editors furthermore welcome papers presenting interdisciplinary research in which law, both Shari’a and secular, is brought face to face with not strictly legal disciplines such as social and political sciences, religion and economics in order to further a comprehensive understanding of the simultaneity of persistence and change in the area of Islamic and Middle Eastern law in a wider context. High academic quality and the international character of the journal are ensured by the Editorial Board, which consists of national and international specialists in the topic area as well as interdisciplinary fields of research.

We explicitly encourage both junior and senior researchers as well as legal practitioners to take part in this discourse by submitting papers dealing with Middle Eastern and Islamic law from a variety of perspectives, and hence in line with the region's rich heritage itself. The editors furthermore welcome papers presenting interdisciplinary research in which law, both Shari’a and secular, is brought face to face with not strictly legal disciplines such as social and political sciences, religion and economics in order to further a comprehensive understanding of the simultaneity of persistence and change in the area of Islamic and Middle Eastern law in a wider context.

High academic quality and the international character of the journal are ensured by the Editorial Board which consists of national and international specialists in the topic area as well as interdisciplinary fields of research.