Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice

BOOK REVIEWS GUIDELINES

Submission Guidelines

• Manuscripts should be in Microsoft Word format

• Manuscripts should be double-spaced (including quotations, excerpts, and footnotes)

• To facilitate our anonymous review process, please prepare your submissions for anonymous review. Include a cover page with the author’s name, affiliation, title, and email address.

• Footnotes should be kept to a minimum and, when used, should follow the OSCOLA referencing guide.

• Include the following information in the title of your review: Title, Author (or Editor), Publisher, Place of Publication, Year, and Pages (if two sets of pages: e.g., xv + 303 pp.). ISBN: 978 1 78811 385 4

Example:

Comparative Religious Law: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Norman Doe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, ix + 457 pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-16713-1

• The name of the reviewer(s) should appear at the beginning, immediately under the title, with an asterisked footnote providing the present position of the author(s) and an address (including email) for contact by readers, along with any desired acknowledgements.
• Follow OSCOLA in all citations.
• The text should be typed in Times New Roman, 12-point font, and single-spaced. The entire manuscript should be paginated through.
• British spelling and punctuation conventions of the English language are used throughout (except in quotations from other sources, where the original conventions should be retained).
• Footnotes are used (not endnotes or in-text citations) and should be kept as brief as possible, primarily for reference purposes; explanatory notes are discouraged.
• The length of book reviews should be 1,000-2,000 words, including footnotes.

Use of AI

If the Author uses AI to generate a book review, there will be no reflection of their personal interpretation. Therefore, we prohibit the use of IA to generate book reviews. We only allow AI to provide limited linguistic assistance, which must be appropriately acknowledged and clearly stated. If the Author has used AI for a book review, there will be no reflection of their personal interpretation.

Deadline

Our publication timelines are the 1st of January, April, July, and October every year. Please send us your review two months before each date so we can include it in the subsequent Issue.

Recommended Format

A good book review provides a quick overview of the main ideas in the text. Also helpful is an account of how the book fits into, or engages in, an on-going philosophical debate. While not required, a compare-and-contrast approach can be useful for demonstrating both the main ideas and the unique positioning of a book. An overview for a book review is good when it is broad and concise, including all and only the main points of the text. A good book review evaluates the text and deploys an argument regarding how successful the book is in achieving its own goals. This may, but need not, involve substantive disagreement with the argumentation found in the text. Many reviews will be best when they: (i) begin with any important background information (e.g. author biography); (ii) provide a summary of the contents of the book; and (iii) end with the reviewer’s evaluations.

A book review is expected to:

- give a brief description of the contents of the book;

- explain what is good about the book and why;

- explain any shortcomings in the book;

- explain what the book caters for;

- suggest who you think should use this book and how;

- evaluate whether the author has referenced all original ideas and quotations; and

- When the author makes claims, they should support them with evidence; if not, the reviewer should question them.

- you should cite pages only when referring to a specific notion or quoting from the book.

Spelling

Generally, we follow OSCOLA. However, spell the following words as follows:

Qur’an, Sunnah, Shari’ah, Shafii, Hanafi, Maliki, Muhammad (when referring to Prophet Muhammad)

Citation

Follow OSCOLA guidelines at all times, except when citing the book under review. In this case, follow the following samples:

While ensuring that it is accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike, the author expressly targets a Muslim audience, inviting them to critically examine the history of the practice of slavery in Islamic communities in order to “confront issues raised by those legacies in the contemporary world” (p. 19).

and….

Powell provides an overview of the complexity of understanding what constitutes an Islamic Law State, due to the variance in the relationship between religious and secular law within domestic systems (p. 45). She claims to be interested in the “consonance and dissonance between Islamic law and international law” and that there is a link between domestic law and interstate law (pp. 47-48).

Dates

Follow the examples below:

In this book, Necmettin Kizilkaya traces the development of legal maxim works between the 10th (4th Hijri) and 19th (13th Hijri) centuries.

The structure of maxim works articulated in the 16th (10th Hijri) century underwent a transformation in the 19th century (13th Hijri) when legal maxims were codified in the Majalla.

Religious Remarks

Where the author wishes to add a remark due to religious rituals, they should always use English. For example, when mentioning the word "Prophet," instead of using (ﷺ), add a footnote stating: Referring to Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. On every occasion that this book mentions the name of the Prophet Muhammad, the terminology Peace be upon him' shall be assumed. Exceptionally, if the remark is needed only once, use brackets. For example, …Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Submission and Contact

Please email your book review submissions and/or queries to the Book Review Editor: Dr Khaled Bashir (khaled.bashir@abdn.ac.uk).