Islamic History Month and my novel

October is Islamic History Month or so I'm told and what better way to celebrate than picking up my novel that's based on Islamic history!

Now this is a speculative historical novel as the setting of an Islamic Matriarchal city is imagined as is the main character who is a young woman defending it using Islamic Law as her weapon. However the time period it's set in is very deliberately chosen to be at a certain period of development of Islamic Law.

An excerpt from the Author's Note in the back:

"Sharia, as we know it today, is embodied most famously in the four main classical Sunni schools of law. These started to coalesce a few hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Before this time there was a wider variety of legal practice in the various regions where Islam had spread. This is examined in The Sources of Islamic Law by John Burton. Some of the competing philosophies that are important to this story, the ahl- al- hadith and the ahl- al- ra’y are alluded to by Burton, but more explicitly detailed in Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought by Daniel W. Brown.

This novel is set in that early period of the Islamic Golden Age before the classical schools of laws were fully established. This corresponds to the ninth century CE, or third century Hijri, after which, as Brown notes, “We find hardly a word spoken in opposition to the main tenets of the classical doctrine of sunna.” This was a time where Muslims grappled with questions on how to uphold the word of God in the novel situations they encountered and answered them in differing ways in different regions. The characters in this novel then are not working within the framework of the classical Sunni schools of laws. Their debates and disagreements are a fictional take on the real arguments that were taking place at the time as what we now consider to be core Islamic practices spread to different communities of early Muslims at different times."