Qadi

A qadi is a judge appointed by the ruler to decide cases under Islamic law, and his defining feature is that his judgment is binding and carried out, which sets him apart from the scholar who only gives opinions.

The office of judgment

The qadi is appointed by the political authority to hear and decide legal cases according to the sacred law, and his rulings are enforced by the power of the state, so he exercises a real judicial office with coercive effect. This is the clean contrast with the mufti: the mufti gives a reasoned opinion, a fatwa, that binds no one and can be sought again elsewhere, while the qadi decides a case between parties and his decision stands and is executed. The qadi applies the law to the facts before him and delivers a verdict.

Appointment and independence

Because the qadi is appointed by the ruler, the office is bound up with political authority in a way the scholarly offices are not, and the relationship between the judge duty to the law and his dependence on the power that appoints and can dismiss him has been a standing tension in Islamic legal history, the ideal of the upright judge who will not bend to the ruler being celebrated precisely because the pressure was real. The qadi is trained in a school of law and appointed to the bench, and his court has historically handled the whole range of legal business. The office corresponds to the judge in any legal system, its distinctive feature within Islam being its application of the sacred law and its position between that law and the state that enforces it.

Classical qadi courts combined the roles a modern legal system would divide among several offices: the same judge heard evidence, applied the substantive law of his school, and issued a verdict without a jury and, in the classical procedure, generally without a formal right of appeal to a higher court in the way developed legal systems now provide, relying instead on the qadi's own recognised learning and the ruler's authority behind the office to give the judgment its finality.

The office survives today with sharply different standing depending on the state. Israel, Nigeria, and several other countries with religiously plural legal systems maintain state-recognised qadi courts with formal jurisdiction, typically over Muslim personal status matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, their judgments enforceable through the ordinary machinery of the state. In the United Kingdom and other Western countries, by contrast, so-called sharia councils operate without any state recognition at all, functioning in practice closer to a mufti's advisory role or a private arbitration panel than to a true qadi court, a distinction that has caused public confusion and, at times, controversy over what authority, if any, such a body actually holds over the parties who come before it.