The Canonization of Islamic Law


Book Description

Ahmed El Shamsy's The Canonization of Islamic Law is a detailed history of the birth of classical Islamic law. It shows how Islamic law and its institutions emerged out of the canonization of the sacred sources of Quran and Sunna (prophetic practice) in the eighth and ninth centuries CE. The book focuses on the ideas and influence of the jurist al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820 CE), who inaugurated the process of canonization, and it paints a rich picture of the intellectual engagements, political turbulence, and social changes that formed the context of his and his followers' careers.




The Canonization of Islamic Law


Book Description

The Canonization of Islamic Law tells the story of the birth of classical Islamic law in the eighth and ninth centuries CE. It shows how an oral normative tradition embedded in communal practice was transformed into a systematic legal science defined by hermeneutic analysis of a clearly demarcated scriptural canon. This transformation was inaugurated by the innovative legal theory of Muhammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfi'ī (d. 820 CE), and it took place against the background of a crisis of identity and religious authority in ninth-century Egypt. By tracing the formulation, reception, interpretation and spread of al-Shāfi'ī's ideas, the author demonstrates how the canonization of scripture that lay at the heart of al-Shāfi'ī's theory formed the basis for the emergence of legal hermeneutics, the formation of the Sunni schools of law, and the creation of a shared methodological basis in Muslim thought.




The Canonization of Islamic Law


Book Description

Ahmed El Shamsy's The Canonization of Islamic Law is a detailed history of the birth of classical Islamic law.




Rediscovering the Islamic Classics


Book Description

The people who selected, edited, and published the new print books on and about Islam exerted a huge influence on the resulting literary tradition. These unheralded editors determined, essentially, what came to be understood by the early twentieth century as the classical written "canon" of Islamic thought. Collectively, this relatively small group of editors who brought Islamic literature into print crucially shaped how Muslim intellectuals, the Muslim public, and various Islamist movements understood the Islamic intellectual tradition. In this book Ahmed El Shamsy recounts this sea change, focusing on the Islamic literary culture of Cairo, a hot spot of the infant publishing industry, from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As El Shamsy argues, the aforementioned editors included some of the greatest minds in the Muslim world and shared an ambitious intellectual agenda of revival, reform, and identity formation. .




Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice


Book Description

Since the 1980s, Muslim women reformers have made great strides in critiquing and reinterpreting the Islamic tradition. Yet these achievements have not produced a significant shift in the lived experience of Islam, particularly with respect to equality and justice in Muslim families. A new approach is needed: one that examines the underlying instruments of tradition and explores avenues for effecting change. In Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice leading intellectuals and emerging researchers grapple with the problem of entrenched positions within Islam that affect women, investigating the processes by which interpretations become authoritative, the theoretical foundations upon which they stand, and the ways they have been used to inscribe and enforce gender limitations. Together, they argue that the Islamic interpretive tradition displays all the trappings of canonical texts, canonical figures, and canon law – despite the fact that Islam does not ordain religious authorities who could sanction processes of canonization. Through this lens, the essays in this collection offer insights into key issues in Islamic feminist scholarship, ranging from interreligious love, child marriage, polygamy, and divorce to stoning, segregation, seclusion, and gender hierarchies. Rooting their analysis in the primary texts and historical literature of Islam, contributors to Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice contest oppressive interpretative canons, subvert classical methodologies, and provide new directions in the ongoing project of revitalizing Islamic exegesis and its ethical and legal implications.




The Second Formation of Islamic Law


Book Description

The Second Formation of Islamic Law offers a new periodization of Islamic legal history in the eastern Islamic lands.




Women in Muslim Family Law


Book Description

Expands and updates family law as it pertains to women with regard to marriage, divorce and inheritance throughout the Middle East.This second revised edition of John L. Esposito's landmark work expands and updates coverage of family law reforms -- marriage, divorce, and inheritance -- throughout the Middle East, North Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.




Legal Authority in Premodern Islam


Book Description

Offering a detailed analysis of the structure of authority in Islamic law, this book focuses on the figure of Yahyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī, who is regarded as the chief contributor to the legal tradition known as the Shāfi'ī madhhab in traditional Muslim sources, named after Muhammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfi'ī (d. 204/820), the supposed founder of the school of law. Al-Nawawī’s legal authority is situated in a context where Muslims demanded to stabilize legal disposition that is consistent with the authority of the madhhab, since in premodern Islamic society, the ruling powers did not produce or promulgate law, as was the case in other, monarchic civilizations. Al-Nawawī’s place in the long-term formation of the madhhab is significant for many reasons but for one in particular: his effort in reconciling the two major interpretive communities among the Shāfi'ites, i.e., the tarīqas of the Iraqians and Khurasanians. This book revisits the history of the Shāfi'ī school in the pre-Nawawic era and explores its later development in the post-Nawawic period. Presenting a comprehensive picture of the structure of authority in Islamic law, specifically within the Shafi’ite legal tradition, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars of Islamic Studies, History and Law.




The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to Islamic legal scholarship, this Handbook offers a direct and accessible introduction to Islamic law and the academic debates within the field. Topics include textual sources and authority, institutions, substantive legal areas, Islamic legal philosophy, and Islamic law in the Muslim World and in Muslim minority countries.




Misquoting Muhammad


Book Description

AN INDEPENDENT BEST BOOKS ON RELIGION 2014 PICK Few things provoke controversy in the modern world like the religion brought by Prophet Muhammad. Modern media are replete with alarm over jihad, underage marriage and the threat of amputation or stoning under Shariah law. Sometimes rumor, sometimes based on fact and often misunderstood, the tenets of Islamic law and dogma were not set in the religion’s founding moments. They were developed, like in other world religions, over centuries by the clerical class of Muslim scholars. Misquoting Muhammad takes the reader back in time through Islamic civilization and traces how and why such controversies developed, offering an inside view into how key and controversial aspects of Islam took shape. From the protests of the Arab Spring to Istanbul at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and from the ochre red walls of Delhi’s great mosques to the trade routes of the Indian Ocean world, Misquoting Muhammad lays out how Muslim intellectuals have sought to balance reason and revelation, weigh science and religion, and negotiate the eternal truths of scripture amid shifting values.