E-Book Overview
This volume introduces six texts of Islamic jurisprudence, authored by six jurists representing all four Sunni schools of Islamic law (two ?anaf?, two Sh?fi??, one Malik?, and one ?anbal?), who lived in areas as far apart as Uzbekistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza (Palestine), Egypt, and Algeria between the tenth and sixteenth centuries CE. My reading of these texts attempts to articulate an underlying structural interrelationship between theoretical and practical legal reasoning in the Islamic juristic tradition. This volume provides an anatomy of Islamic legal reasoning, centered on the basic concepts of human agency, responsibility, rights, legal hermeneutics, extra-textual sources of the law, and basic inquiries, such as the jurisdiction of law in Islam and the relationship between law and government and between law and theology.
E-Book Content
STRUCTURAL INTERRELATIONS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ISLAMIC LAW STUDIES IN ISLAMIC LAW AND SOCIETY edited by Ruud Peters and Bernard Weiss volume 27 STRUCTURAL INTERRELATIONS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ISLAMIC LAW A Study of Six Works of Medieval Islamic Jurisprudence BY AHMAD ATIF AHMAD BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISSN 1384–1130 ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15031-7 ISBN-10: 90-04-15031-5 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands To my mother Asm§a (1944– ), my first and most significant teacher; to my father b$ãif (1942– ), who told me as I turned 13, “you are no longer just my son; from now on, you are also my friend”; to the memory of my grandpa AÈmad (1906–2006), whose presence and views gave me a different perspective on continuity and change; and to my nephew Yåsuf (2004– ), who will likely inhabit a world quite different from that inhabited by all of the above . . . I dedicate this work Ahmad CONTENTS Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Glossary of Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi xiii xv xxi Chapter I. Terminology and Theoretical Frameworks . . . . . . . . TakhrÊj, Ußål and Furåb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sources, Components, and Telos of Ußål al-Fiqh . . . . . . . . Legal Theory and Legal Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Law: Islamic and Non-Islamic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Question of Genre in Legal Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 4 9 13 15 Chapter II. Impressions and Misconceptions in the Study of Islamic Legal History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Muslim Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traditional Approaches to Islamic Legal history and the Mab§dÊ of Ußål Al-Fiqh . .