This chapter examines encounters around mental illness that played out within mandate Palestine’s hybrid legal system. Issues of mental competency and legal responsibility were debated across civil and religious courts, but this chapter focuses on the criminal courtroom and criminal insanity defences. Criminal insanity defences forced mandate judges, medical experts, and lay witnesses to debate what forms of behaviour and thought were evidence of mental illness, and what should, by contrast, be considered normal, ‘rational’, and therefore punishable for a given defendant. Through a close reading of two exemplary cases, this chapter moves beyond the historiography’s focus on cultural difference to highlight how different bodies of knowledge – psychiatric, social, and folkloric – were put to work to define the ‘normal’ in relation to other axes of identity like age, class, and gender. A third case, which played out against the backdrop of the Palestinian great revolt, meanwhile reveals how understandings of the ‘normal’ could be warped by wider political circumstances, with life-or-death consequences for defendants.

In this chapter, I will reflect on Lev’s analysis of the political dimensions of Indonesia’s Islamic courts system. As a postscript in his last chapter of his book Islamic courts in Indonesia, Lev looks into the question of what consequences of political developments in 1971 might have for the future of the Islamic courts. According to Lev, a dual legal system consisting of ‘civil and religious legal systems reflect competing political principles and sources of legitimacy that cannot be tolerated for long’. Lev predicted in 1971 that the civil legal system in ‘one form or another’ would attempt to subjugate Islamic institutions to overriding principles of state legitimacy and bureaucratic integrity, but that the result of this process would be uncertain and dependent on the development of the religious–social–political cleavage in Indonesia. Below I will argue that a convergence between the civil and religious legal systems took place after 1971, but that this was not the result of subjugation of religious law by the civil legal system, but of an increased fusion of the civil and the religious pillars within Indonesia’s religious, social, political and legal domains.