Islamic law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Seven years of casework has taught me that the law people actually live by is often not the law written in the statute book. In my job at a housing advice service I meet clients whose arrangements about money, property and family were settled long before anyone considered how an English court might read them. Two strands of that work pushed me towards postgraduate study of Islamic law: couples who had married religiously but not civilly and found themselves without the protections they assumed they had, and clients whose informal family lending arrangements, deliberately structured without interest, were poorly understood by the agencies dealing with their arrears.

My interest began earlier, during my LLB. I wrote my dissertation on the recognition of religious-only marriages in English family law, arguing that the case law's focus on ceremonial formality sat awkwardly with the substantive expectations of the parties. Writing it obliged me to read beyond English sources and to take seriously the internal logic of the nikah as a contract with its own conditions, consideration and grounds for dissolution. I was conscious at the time that I was working from translations and secondary literature, and that my grasp of the classical material was thin. That gap is much of the reason I am applying now rather than continuing to read around the edges of the subject.

Since graduating I have tried to prepare seriously and without pretending to expertise I do not have. I have worked steadily through Wael Hallaq's An Introduction to Islamic Law, which reshaped how I think about the relationship between jurists, courts and rulers, and about the effect of codification on a tradition that had operated through scholarly debate rather than legislative text. Reading Hallaq alongside Kecia Ali's work on marriage in early jurisprudence made me more careful about treating the fiqh as a single settled body of rules; the disagreement between schools, and within them, is the interesting part. I have also attended a community Arabic class for the past three years, two evenings a week. I can read straightforward classical prose slowly with a dictionary and I am not yet able to work independently in primary sources, but I have enough to follow transliterated terminology properly and to see what is lost in translation.

My casework is relevant in less obvious ways. Drafting possession defences and representing clients at hearings has made me a disciplined reader of authority and a cautious one about arguments that sound appealing but cannot be sourced. Supervising two junior caseworkers has meant explaining reasoning clearly to people who will then have to apply it themselves. Volunteering at a mosque advice surgery, where I take notes and refer visitors to solicitors or debt advisers, has shown me how often questions arrive as a mixture of legal, religious and family difficulty, and how easily an adviser can overstep what they actually know.

For dissertation work I would like to examine how English courts have handled the dissolution of religious marriages, and in particular the interaction between civil financial remedies and the expectations created by the mahr. I am interested in whether the comparative literature on recognition offers a better framework than the ad hoc approach currently taken.

Returning to full-time study at 31 is a considered decision. I have saved towards it, discussed reduced hours with my employer, and I am prepared for the shift from casework rhythms to sustained reading. I would like to end up either in academic research or in practice advising on family and finance matters where both legal traditions are in play.

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