A Single Judge, Applying Sharia

A qadi court is presided over by a single judge, the qadi, trained in the jurisprudence, fiqh, of a particular legal school and appointed to interpret and apply sharia in disputes brought before him, historically covering a range that could extend from ordinary contracts and family matters to criminal cases depending on the period and the political authority the court operated under.

Hallaq's scholarship on Islamic law describes the classical qadi as appointed by a ruler or state authority yet formally expected to judge according to established legal doctrine rather than at the ruler's discretion, a tension between political appointment and juristic independence that runs through the whole history of the institution and that different rulers and different periods resolved very differently in practice. Procedure in a classical qadi court had no equivalent of a jury; the qadi actively examined witnesses and evidence himself, relying heavily on witness testimony and, where evidence was inconclusive, on oaths sworn by the parties, a model that placed enormous weight on the individual judge's own diligence and integrity rather than distributing judicial responsibility across a panel. Ottoman era qadi courts, among the best documented historically through their surviving court registers, show this pattern clearly, recording everything from routine commercial disputes to family inheritance in a single judge's daily docket.