Until recently, academic research considered the use of written documents by qadi courts throughout history as one of the major signs of the disconnection of Muslim legal thinking (fiqh) from applied law. This paradigm of a theory-practice-gap in “Islamic law” was built upon a reduced understanding of fiqh’s procedural laws, which only included oral forms of testimony (šahāda), acknowledgement (iqrār) and judicial oath (yamīn) as potential elements for judicial proof (bayyina), and therefore relegates...