ИСТИНА

It is commonly agreed that oral forms remained basic for all traditional cultures and dominated in the area of social regulation. This feature was fully inherent to medieval law due to the predominance of customary law. To regulate relations between individuals or individuals and authorities meant in Medieval Europe to know, to use and to represent legal norms of a polity or a community – consuetudines, usus, forum, customs. The written right was considered as a legal form very special in its sense and social role. Medieval culture itself understood it and tried to fix in written form the norms of customs, however, this had no effect on the practical use of customary tradition. However, it is less clear how can we know anything about oral legal tradition, this real and natural instrument of human communication if its voice has been lost in the past. To study Medieval Law without evaluating the considerable part of cases, to describe medieval legal structures neglecting the oral rules and the horizon of legal feeling, would lead to distortion of factual picture. The described methodological problem becomes even more complex if we study a society in which the different religious groups were included, e.g. not only Christians, but also Jews and Muslims. The interaction among confessional communities, the links and the deals between people imparted to this society the modality of Interculturality. The focal question of my paper is How can we study the Law of Muslims who lived under the Christians Rulers. There were active and day-to-day relations on the one hand, and almost total absence of sources from Muslim’s communities, on the other. The new concept of “Legal Space” is proposed here in order to open new horizons in our study of the Sharia within the Interculturality of the Latin World. The use of this concept reveals new anthropological and social dimensions in the legal history of Medieval Europe.