Flexible Forms of Contracts: Transactions through Fictitious Settlements (ṣulḥ/muṣālaḥa) in Iran

In the second half of the nineteenth century, practitioners of law in Iran were looking for more flexibility in contractual forms, especially those used to conclude routine transactions of properties and services. They increasingly made use of a type of contract named muṣālaḥa-nāma, derived from the legal concept of ṣulḥ and defined primarily as a means to arrange the amicable settlement of disputes. The present contribution attempts to categorise the kind of transactions for which this universal contractual type could be employed and raises the question what advantages such a “new” contractual form might have entailed.