What do you do when divine law and the justice demanded by your conscience clash? Muslims have wrestled with this problem since the earliest caliphates. The mazalim courts, dating back to the eighth century, were the answer: courts where any subject could appeal directly to an Islamic ruler regarding any matter of justice.

Mazalim courts, which were not bound by the rulings of an established school of Islamic law, could address crises in authority and order that Shariah courts could not. Bestselling author Jonathan A.C. Brown unveils the history of mazalim courts, analyses the political, legal and theological thought of its tradition and contends that mazalim courts did not oppose or transcend Shariah.

Mazalim courts allowed the state to step in and provide substantive justice when procedural justice failed its subjects.