The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law


Book Description

Melchert traces the emergence of jurisprudence by h ad th, the personalization of the old regional schools in response, and finally the emergence of the classical, guild schools, with regular means of forming students, in the early tenth century.




The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E.


Book Description

The Sunni schools of law are named for jurisprudents of the eighth and ninth centuries, but they did not actually function so early. The main division at that time was rather between adherents of ra'y and ḥadīth. No school had a regular means of forming students. Relying mainly on biographical dictionaries, this study traces the constitutive elements of the classical schools and finds that they first came together in the early tenth century, particularly with the work of Ibn Surayj (d. 306/918), al-Khallāl (d. 311/923), and a series of ḥanafī teachers ending with al-Karkhī (d. 340/952). Mālikism prospered in the West for political reasons, while the ẓāhirī and Jarīrī schools faded out due to their refusal to adopt the common new teaching methods. In this book the author fleshes out these historical developments in a manner that will be extremely useful to the field, while at the same time developing some new and highly original perspectives.




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 Formation of Islamic Law


Book Description

The fourteen studies included in this volume have been chosen to serve several purposes simultaneously. At a basic level, they aim to provide a general - if not wholly systematic - coverage of the emergence and evolution of law during the first three and a half centuries of Islam. On another level, they reflect the different and, at times, widely divergent scholarly approaches to this subject matter. These two levels combined will offer a useful account of the rise of Islamic law not only for students in this field but also for Islamicists who are not specialists in matters of law, comparative legal historians, and others. At the same time, however, and as the Introduction to the work argues, this collection of distinguished contributions illustrates both the achievements and the shortcomings of paradigmatic scholarship on the formative period of Islamic law.




The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics


Book Description

This book is the first historical analysis of those parts of Islamic legal theory that deal with the language of revelation, and a milestone in reconstructing the missing history of legal theory in the ninth and tenth centuries. It offers a fresh interpretation of al-Shafii's seminal thought, and traces the development of four different responses to his hermeneutic, culminating in the works of Ibn Hazm, Abd al-Jabbar, al-Baqillani, and Abu Yala Ibn al-Farra. It reveals startling connections between rationalism and literalism, and documents how the remarkable diversity that characterized even traditionalist schools of law was eclipsed in the fifth/eleventh century by a pragmatic hermeneutic that gave jurists the interpretive power and flexibility they needed to claim revealed status for their legal doctrines. More than a detailed and richly documented history, this book opens new avenues for the comparative study of legal and hermeneutical theories, and offers new insights into unstated premises that shape and restrict Muslim legal discourse today. The book is of interest to all occupied with classical Islam, the development of Islamic law, and comparative hermeneutical research.




An Introduction to Islamic Law


Book Description

The study of Islamic law can be a forbidding prospect for those entering the field for the first time. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar and practitioner of Islamic law, guides students through the intricacies of the subject in this absorbing introduction. The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of Islamic law in its pre-modern natural habitat. The second part explains how the law was transformed and ultimately dismantled during the colonial period. In the final chapters, the author charts recent developments and the struggles of the Islamists to negotiate changes which have seen the law emerge as a primarily textual entity focused on fixed punishments and ritual requirements. The book, which includes a chronology, a glossary of key terms, and lists of further reading, will be the first stop for those who wish to understand the fundamentals of Islamic law, its practices and history.




The Islamic School of Law


Book Description

These selected papers from the III International Conference on Islamic Legal Studies, held in 2000 at Harvard Law School, offer building blocks toward the entire edifice of understanding the complex development of the madhhab, a development that, even in the contemporary dissolution of madhhab lines and grouping, continues to fascinate.




Doubt in Islamic Law


Book Description

This book considers the rarely studied but pervasive concepts of doubt that medieval Muslim jurists used to resolve problematic criminal cases.




Sharī'a


Book Description

In recent years, Islamic law, or Shari'a, has been appropriated as a tool of modernity in the Muslim world and in the West and has become highly politicised in consequence. Wael Hallaq's magisterial overview of Shari'a sets the record straight by examining the doctrines and practices of Islamic law within the context of its history, and by showing how it functioned within pre-modern Islamic societies as a moral imperative. In so doing, Hallaq takes the reader on an epic journey tracing the history of Islamic law from its beginnings in seventh-century Arabia, through its development and transformation under the Ottomans, and across lands as diverse as India, Africa and South-East Asia, to the present. In a remarkably fluent narrative, the author unravels the complexities of his subject to reveal a love and deep knowledge of the law which will inform, engage and challenge the reader.




The Early History of Ismaili Jurisprudence


Book Description

Researchers have shed light on the literary production of the Ismailis since the early 1930s. The cataloguing of these work has been carried out by Ivanow, Fyzee, Goriawala, Poonawala, Gacek, Cortese and de Bloise. Many works attributable to Ismaili scholars, however, are still unavailable either because they remain hidden in private collections or because they have not survived. Ismaili law, in particular, is still a largely unexplored field of study. Al-Qadi Abu Hanifa al-Nu'man is generally considered the founder and greatest exponent of Ismaili jurisprudence, Many of his works have been lost, and information on some others is scattered; yet other works remain in manuscript form, and only a few have been published. The present book is a critical edition and translation of al-Nu'man's Minhaj al-fara'id, based on its three known copies. It deals with the law of inheritance, one of the most complex in Islamic law. In comparing the Minhaj with two published works (the Da'a'im al-Islam and Kitab al-iqtisar) as well as a manuscript (Mukhtasar al-athar) of al-Nu'man, a significant doctrinal evolution clearly emerges, reflecting his early Maliki training and then his work under four Fatimid imams. Ismaili law is also compared with the doctrines of the Imami school as well as the legal system of the four Sunni schools. This book thus allows us to determine the time of the composition of the Minhaj al-fara id, the development and the originality of Ismaili jurisprudence, and its relation to other schools of law.