[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from De Gruyter on the theme of Islamic Studies. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Harmonizing Similarities: A History of Distinctions Literature in Islamic Law
By Elias G. Saba
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
The Qur'ān: A Form-Critical History
By Karim Samji
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Interpretations of Jihad in Southeast Asia: An Intellectual History
By Tariq Rahman
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Philosophy and Jurisprudence in the Islamic World
Edited by Peter Adamson
About the Book
About the Editor
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Harmonizing Similarities: A History of Distinctions Literature in Islamic Law
By Elias G. Saba
About the Book
Harmonizing Similarities is a study of the legal distinctions (al-furūq alfiqhiyya) literature and its role in the development of the Islamic legal heritage. This book reconsiders how the public performance of Islamic law helped shape legal literature. It identifies the origins of this tradition in contemporaneous lexicographic and medical literature, both of which demonstrated the productive potential of drawing distinctions. Elias G. Saba demonstrates the implications of the legal furūq and how changes to this genre reflect shifts in the social consumption of Islamic legal knowledge. The interest in legal distinctions grew out of the performance of knowledge in formalized legal disputations. From here, legal distinctions incorporated elements of play through its interactions with the genre of legal riddles. As play, books of legal distinctions were supplements to performance in literary salons, study circles, and court performances; these books also served as mimetic objects, allowing the reader to participate in a session virtually. Saba underscores how social and intellectual practices helped shape the literary development of Islamic law and that literary elaboration became a main driver of dynamism in Islamic law.
About the Author:
Elias G. Saba is Lecturer in Religious Studies at Grinnell College, Grinnel, IA, USA. He received his PhD in 2017 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Elias G. Saba was awarded with the BRAIS prize 2018.
In the Media
More about the De Gruyter-BRAIS (British Association for Islamic Studies) prize:http://www.brais.ac.uk/prize/2018-announcement
Additional Information:
October 2019
248 pages
Hardcover: RRP € [D] 86.95 / US$ 99.99 / GBP 79.00
eBook: RRP € [D] 86.95 / US$ 99.99 / GBP 79.00
ISBN 978-3-11-060405-4
PDF ISBN 978-3-11-060579-2
EPUB ISBN 978-3-11-060439-9
Where to Purchase
On De Gruyter Website: http://bit.ly/2S5otVN
On Amazon:https://amzn.to/2UfVuRA
Excerpt
Introduction
What is the social history of Islamic legal literature? The answer to this question remains unclear. Even though the history and development of Islamic law have long formed the subject of extensive scholarly study, scholars have not discussed the rhetoric or aesthetics of law’s literature. Most of the study of Islamic law has tended to focus on the legal system that is described in works of Islamic law, at the expense of the way that this system is expressed. Yet, change and dynamism in Islamic law also occurs through the ways in which legal knowledge is pack- aged, organized, and presented; in other words, through development and change in literary features, such as genre. A focus on Islamic law as a field of learning rather than as part of a legal system requires a greater focus on its literary characteristics.
Modern scholarship has generally divided the history of Islamic law into three periods: “early,” “middle,” and “modern.” Most scholars have focused on the rise and early development of the Islamic legal tradition or the transition to multiple modern, national ones that selectively incorporate concepts from Islamic law. This division parallels the prevailing periodization of the history of Islamic societies generally. Marshall Hodgson divided that history into three broad periods, which he labeled “the Classical Age,” “the Middle Periods,” and “Gun- powder Empires and Modern Time.” Until recently, the middle periods have been sorely understudied. Wael Hallaq, arguably the leading western scholar of Islamic law, has referred to this post-formative period, from approximately 1250 to 1800, as “a virtual terra incognita.” This lack of scholarly attention is due to a belief that this period was one of legal and cultural stagnation. The scholars who do study this period, however, have shown that Islamic law under- went remarkable changes.
The misunderstanding about a so-called “middle period” of Islamic law relates, at least in part, to a misconception about the very nature of Islamic legal change. In arguments about development or lack thereof, scholars have attempted to look for changes or development in either the substantive rules of Islamic law (furūʿ al-fiqh) or in legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). Since Islamic law is understood as a legal system, it makes sense to look for development to occur in manuals of substantive laws or in the theoretical writings on legal interpretation. Furūʿ al-fiqh and uṣūl al-fiqh are not the two halves of Islamic law, however; they are only two genres of Islamic legal literature. In addition, Islamic law can also be under- stood as a scholarly discipline, concerned with the production and organization of a specific kind of knowledge. According to this understanding, promulgation of new substantive rules and advancements in legal theory are only two possible kinds of development.
This book traces the history of one understudied genre, that of legal distinctions, al-furūq al-fiqhiyya – the comparison of apparently similar fact-patterns that lead to different legal outcomes. Examining thirty-six works that belong to this genre, composed over a period of approximately six hundred years, allows us to understand the social and intellectual trends that drove the rhetoric of this genre. The beginnings of this genre can confidently be dated to the fourth/tenth century, though the earliest such work remains to be identified. The fifth/eleventh century saw a surge in works addressing legal distinctions, and the genre flourished in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. Books of legal distinctions were written in all four Sunni schools of law, although it found greatest currency in the Shāfiʿī school. In general, Shi’i jurists did not compose works of legal distinctions, although an early work is attributed to the Shi’i jurist Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Barqī (d. third/ninth c.) and another work is attributed to the Zaydī author ʿAlī ibn Yaḥyā ibn Rāshid al-Washlī al- Yamanī (d. 777/1375–76). The genre seems to have been particularly popular in large urban centers, with an original point of focus in Abbasid Baghdad and later in Mamluk Cairo. The manuscripts of books of legal distinctions show that these works were copied and recopied often and circulated widely.
This study emphasizes one literary manifestation of Islamic law. In particular, it looks to expand the study of genre within Islamic legal writing by carrying out a history of one particular genre. The genre of legal distinctions has received little scholarly attention. Nevertheless, its history is an important part of the development of Islamic law. This study shows the genre to be a valuable rubric for locating the relevance of later Islamic legal literature, and in particular high- lights the intellectual and social background from which this genre emerged and the specific ways in which the genre of legal distinctions adapted to changing social patterns that affected the consumption of Islamic legal knowledge.
Furūq literature offered a venue that allowed jurists to adapt the law in new packaging as a response to social demand for new and different forms of legal knowledge.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
The Qur'ān: A Form-Critical History
By Karim Samji
About the Book
The corpus coranicum eludes familiar categories and resists strict labels. No doubt the threads woven into the fabric are exceptionally textured, varied, and complex. Accordingly, the introductory chapter of this book demonstrates the application of form criticism to the text. Chapter two then presents a formcritical study of the prayer genre. It identifies three productive formulae and addresses distinct social settings and forms associated with them. The third chapter begins by defining the liturgy genre vis-à-vis prayer in the Qurʾān. Drawing a line between the hymn and litany forms, this chapter treats each in turn. Chapter four considers the genre classified as wisdom literature. It identifies sapiential formulae and sheds light on wisdom contexts. The fifth chapter examines the narrative genre writ large. It also surveys narrative blocks of the long saga. The subsequent chapter on the proclamation genre inspects a set of vocative formulae, which occurs in the messenger situation. The concluding chapter looks at the corpus through synchronic and diachronic lenses. In the end, Qurʾānic genres encapsulate the form-critical elements of formulae, forms, and settings, as well as an historical dimension.
About the Author
Dr. Karim Samji is Assistant Professor of History at the Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania. Education: B.A. University of California, Los Angeles; M.A. University of Utah; M.A. University of Michigan; Ph.D. University of Michigan.
Additional Information
December 2019
X, 305 pages
Hardcover: RRP € [D] 86.95 / US$ 99.99 / GBP 79.00
ISBN 978-3-11-057545-3
Paperback: RRP € [D] 20.95 / US$ 24.99 / GBP 19.00
ISBN 978-3-11-068512-1
eBook: RRP € [D] 86.95 / US$ 99.99 / GBP 79.00
PDF ISBN 978-3-11-058088-4
EPUB ISBN 978-3-11-058004-4
Where to Purchase
On De Gruyter Website: http://bit.ly/2RFLIqm
On Amazon: https://amzn.to/3b0bvkX
Excerpt
Chapter 1: Method
1.1 Introduction
The present monograph examines the constructive application of genre criticism to the corpus coranicum. Hermann Gunkel (d. 1932) established the method in response to the problems endemic to psalm criticism and extended its scope to the entire Old Testament corpus.Before long his students Martin Dibelius (d. 1947) and Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976) blazed a trail in the study of the New Testament.Particularly pertinent to this discussion of method is Johann Gottfried von Herder (d. 1803), whose formative influence on Gunkel was decisive.
Dibelius positively asserts, “Herder was the pioneer of such movements in the sphere of biblical literature...he intuitively put forward many axioms, which only at a later date were to reach significance for criticism.” In point of fact, Herder set the stage and the tone when he endorsed the view that scripture as literature be treated historically. As a result, the shape of things to come is pre- figured in Herder. Karl Barth (d. 1968) repeatedly stresses without exaggeration, “Without Herder, there is no Schleiermacher, no de Wette...Without Herder, there is no Erlangen school, no history of religion school.” Largely through Herder, the history of religion method had deep and manifold roots in the modern classical philology of Friedrich August Wolf (d. 1824), the nascent historical discipline of Leopold von Ranke (d. 1886), the emergent science of religion of Friedrich Max Müller (d. 1900), and the historical-critical method of Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918). For instance, the echo of Herder is heard in August Boeckh (d. 1867), who combined the philological and hermeneutical insights of Wolf and Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834), respectively: “The highest task of genre criticism is to investigate whether content and form...are suitable for the inner aim of a genre...” Gunkel concurs that “aesthetic or literary quality is not merely superficial.” In other words, he holds that “aesthetic description can be scholarly.”
Turning to the critique of the eponymous Wellhausen school, Gunkel opens with a simple disclaimer: Wellhausen is above reproach. Nonetheless, Gunkel asserts that an inadvertent consequence of higher criticism is the relative disregard for historical aesthetics. In tandem with Herder, he lays this inopportune development at the doorstep of Enlightenment rationalism. In this respect, Gunkel cites the proclivity of the Wellhausen school towards argumentum ex silentio and the legal dictum quod non est in actis, non est in mundo. Yet again, without fail, he denies Wellhausen’s complicity in the matter. However, Gunkel takes to task historical criticism, which is premised exclusively on written rather than mixed transmission. He criticizes the Wellhausen school for its failure to recognize the cataloguing of genres as the primary task of research. As is so often the case in history, Gunkel’s ideas were poorly received, and even met stern resistance. It was none other than Carl Heinrich Becker (d. 1933) who promoted members of the history of religion school, and most prominently, Gunkel. In concert with the “little Göttingen faculty,” Gunkel promulgated his conception, in which the history of religion works hand in hand with the history of literature. Henning Reventlow (d. 2010) reflects on Gunkel’s place in intellectual history:
One could say that Gunkel blazed new paths in every field in which he worked, and in many cases methodologically broke new ground. Against a generation that had been rep- resented by Wellhausen, he led scholarship to a completely altered outlook, especially in Old Testament research.
In sum, James Muilenburg (d. 1974) emphasizes, “the first and most obvious achievement of genre criticism is that it supplied a much-needed corrective to literary and historical criticism.” Having laid a basis for discussion, let us now turn to scholarly approaches to the Qurʾān.
[...]
1.4 Summary
It should go without saying that the Qurʾān did not develop in a literary vacuum. In other words, the corpus is embedded within an intertextual matrix that emerged in late antiquity. Late Hellenistic and Arabic literary frames of reference form the coordinate plane and textual world of the Qurʾān, wherein biblical dramatis personae, narratives, and themes feature prominently. The late anti- que milieu has likewise shaped its structure. For instance, “the observation that early Meccan sūras are structurally similar to the Psalms (al-zabūr), which equal ly constitute polythematic compositions, has long been made.” In spite of this, the genre criticism of the Qurʾān remains a desideratum. As a codified text, it draws from a multitude of sources. Each literary genre is rooted in its sphere of life. The wide range of genres is indicative of a corresponding range of situations. In terms of procedure, Gunkel states, “Since it concerns literary witnesses, the genres of this type of poetry must be substantiated.” Accordingly, this monograph demonstrates that the corpus coranicum evidences a significant number of literary genres that includes prayer, liturgy, wisdom, narrative, and proclamation. Above all, what is essential is the determined insistence of Gunkel that genre criticism is “the firm ground from which everything else must ascend.”Let us bring this introduction to a close and open a new critical chapter in Qurʾān scholarship with the single proviso: “To evaluate the work one must participate within its methodological presuppositions and evaluate the final results.”
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Interpretations of Jihad in Southeast Asia: An Intellectual History
By Tariq Rahman
About the Book
In the wake of radical Islamist terrorist attacks described as jihad worldwide and in South Asia, it is imperative that there should be a book-length study of this idea in this part of the world. The focus of the study is the idea of jihad with its changing interpretations mostly those available in exegetical literature of key figures in South Asia. The hermeneutic devices used to understand the meaning of the Quranic verses and the Prophetic traditions relating to jihad will be the focus of this study. The main thrust of the study is to understand how interpretations of jihad vary. It is seen as being both defensive and aggressive by traditionalists; only defensive and mainly about moral improvement by progressive Muslims; and being insurrectionist, aggressive, eternal and justifying violence against civilians by radical Islamists. One purpose of the book is to understand how the radical interpretation came to South Asia. The book also explains how theories about jihad are influenced by the political and social circumstances of the period and how these insights feed into practice legitimizing militant movements called jihad for that period.
About the Author
Dr. Tariq Rahman is HEC Distinguished National Professor Emeritus and Dean of School of Education and School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan. Amongst others he was awarded with the Humboldt Research Award for excellence in research in 2012.
Reviews
“This said, Rahman has investigated ideas of jihad in South Asia to a breadth and a depth rivalled by no other. He has produced arguments about how they have changed which all should note. In the process he has produced a book of great value both to the scholar and the policy maker”
Francis Robinson in: Bloomsbury Pakistan. Social Science Research (27.02.2019), http://www.bloomsburypakistan.org/book-review-interpretations-of-jihad-in-south-asia/
“This book, which presents a historical course of the transformation of jihād as a concept in South Asia, is an essential read for scholars of religion and contiguous fields.“
Zahra Saffia Réka Uta Máté (2019), Interpretations of Jihad in South Asia: an intellectual history, in: Contemporary South Asia, 27:4, 567-568, https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2019.1689673
Additional Information
October 2018
xx, 316 pages
Hardcover: RRP € [D] 79.95 / US$ 91.99 / GBP 72.50
eBook: RRP € [D] 79.95 / US$ 91.99 / GBP 72.50
ISBN 978-3-11-055027-6
PDF ISBN 978-3-11-055201-0
EPUB ISBN 978-3-11-055035-1
Where to Purchase
On De Gruyter Website: https://bit.ly/3aRtqdk
On Amazon: https://amzn.to/3aXBXv8
Excerpt
Introduction
Since the attacks of September 11, 2011 (popularly referred to as 9/11), the term ‘jihad’ has become a household word. After every attack on targets in the Western world, be it the underground of London, Madrid, or Paris, or the 2016 March attacks in Brussels, Muslims, as well as people in the West who want good relations with them, insist that jihad means the quest for moral improvement and that, if one kind of jihad (the lesser one) does mean fighting, it is only in self-defence which is an internationally recognised right of all nations and peoples. Their antagonists dismiss these claims, arguing that jihad in practice as well as theory actually refers to aggressive warfare against non-Muslims. Among Muslims too, in an ironic twist, there are supporters of that argument. Indeed, Islamist militants have written tracts calling for unending war against the West (whom they call ‘crusaders’) and their supporters, i. e. rulers of Muslim countries. These are no mere theoretical concerns; these are matters of life and death. Hence, not only out of intellectual curiosity but also for practical reasons of policy-making, it is imperative that the interpretations of jihad should be understood for the world as a whole and, particularly, for flashpoints in it. And one of these flash-points, incidentally one in which the author happens to live, is Pakistan. Pakistan has been at the centre of violent jihādī activities for more than a decade. Afghanistan has been fighting a series of wars, which have been called jihad, for thirty years, and India has been the brunt of attacks by groups claiming to be jihādī in the last few years.
Giving precise definitions of the various interpretations of Islam is a difficult undertaking. However, some guidelines for the usage of terms which will appear in this work are necessary. Here the term radical Islamists is used for people or groups who believe it is justified to use violence to create an Islamic state or fight ‘Western’ powers which, in their perception, exploit Muslims or prevent Islam from gaining political ascendancy over the world. The terms jihādīs and Islamist militants are used interchangeably for groups actually using violent means as opposed to merely approving of such use. Other studies, generally by political scientists, often use the term, Islamism, for the terms given above. Islamism is defined by Volpi in his introduction to ‘political Islam’ as ‘the political dynamics generated by the activities of those people who believe that Islam as a body of faith has something crucial to say about how society should be organized, and who seek to implement this idea as a matter of priority’. Political Islam may not always lead to violence but sometimes it does. Hence the need for precise terms such as the ones used above for groups choosing to apply their ideas to change the world by violence in the name of Islam. Other terms used at places in this study are salafism and Wahhābism (or Wahabism as it is called in the popular press). The first is based on following the way of life of the pious early Muslims. The second is based on the thought of the 18th century religious reformer Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1703-91) who preached a return to ‘original’ Islam since innovations– like mysticism and asking for the intercession of saints or worshipping at their tombs – he said, were akin to idolatry. Those who interpret the canonical sources literally are often labelled in the press as fundamentalists but this usage is disputed by Muslims. Labels like neo-fundamentalists and moderate Islamists are also used in the literature but remain imprecise and will, therefore, be avoided in this study. It is, however, wise to remember that these categories are neither immutable nor hermetic. Not only strict practitioners of the faith and radical Islamists shade into one another, but, in fact, all groups do. Indeed, it is true to say that ‘actual Islamist groups do not necessarily fall neatly into either of these ideal-type categories’. Moreover, ‘movements frequently change their identity over time, becoming more radicalized or more “mainstream”’. But our interest is in the ideas of those who believe in initiating wars, attacks, and armed insurrections with reference to ‘Islamic referents – terms, symbols and events taken from the Islamic tradition’.And this is because some of this kind of thought has influenced Pakistan in recent years. While we are not concerned with finding the causes or cures of radical Islamist thought or militancy, we are interested in tracing out the intellectual history of this interpretation in South Asia. For the purposes of this study, the term South Asia refers primarily to the Urdu-using part of what used to be British India and is also called the Subcontinent. Urdu is used for formal writing of the works, mainly exegeses of the Qur’an that we shall be dealing with from the Khyber Pass in present-day Pakistan up to the urban areas of Bengal as well as in the former states of Hyderabad, Rampur, and Bhopal. However, while we shall touch in passing upon the last three areas, our focus will be on the Muslim societies of north India and Pakistan. Essentially it boils down to the question of how jihad came to be interpreted in this manner. This is the central question of this book. But before answering this question let us give a brief introduction to what is available in the canonical sources, the Qur’an and the hadith (pl. aḥa-dīth), about war. Our major objective is to highlight interpretations of texts which are used by radical Islamists to justify their actions. […]
Call for Reviews
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Philosophy and Jurisprudence in the Islamic World
Edited by Peter Adamson
About the Book
This book brings together the study of two great disciplines of the Islamic world: law and philosophy. In both sunni and shiite Islam, it became the norm for scholars to acquire a high level of expertise in the legal tradition. Thus some of the greatest names in the history of Aristotelianism were trained jurists, like Averroes, or commented on the status and nature of law, like al-Fārābī. While such authors sought to put law in its place relative to the philosophical disciplines, others criticized philosophy from a legal viewpoint, like al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya. But this collection of papers does not only explore the relative standing of law and philosophy. It also looks at how philosophers, theologians, and jurists answered philosophical questions that arise from jurisprudence itself. What is the logical structure of a well-formed legal argument? What standard of certainty needs to be attained in passing down judgments, and how is that standard reached? What are the sources of valid legal judgment and what makes these sources authoritative? May a believer be excused on grounds of ignorance? Together the contributions provide an unprecedented demonstration of the close connections between philosophy and law in Islamic society, while also highlighting the philosophical interest of texts normally studied only by legal historians.
About the Editor
Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. His primary areas of interest are late ancient philosophy and Arabic philosophy. His monographs deal with the Arabic version of Plotinus, the so-called "Theology of Aristotle," and with al-Kindi (d. after 870 AD). He has devoted articles to several figures of the Greek tradition: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Porphyry; and numerous philosophers of the Arabic tradition, including al-Kindi, Abu Bakr al-Razi, Yahya Ibn 'Adi, Miskawayh, Avicenna, and Averroes. He has also edited and co-edited numerous books, including "The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy".
In the Media
Peter Adamson hosts the History of Philosophy podcast: https://www.historyofphilosophy.net and is very active on twitter @HistPhilosophy
Additional Information
September 2019
XII, 316 pages
Hardcover & eBook: RRP € [D] 99.95 / US$ 114.99 / GBP 91.00
ISBN 978-3-11-055197-6
PDF ISBN 978-3-11-055238-6
EPUB ISBN 978-3-11-055218-8
Where to Purchase
On De Gruyter Website: https://bit.ly/316yWEt
On Amazon: https://amzn.to/2O92Gvi
Excerpt
Preface
For many authors of the Islamic world “philosophy” was synonymous with “Aristotelianism,” and modern-day scholars largely follow suit. Even while admitting that other influences, both Greek (Neoplatonism) and indigenous (kalām), affected the development of philosophy in the Islamic world, historians of philosophy have typically concentrated on issues that are at home within the Aristotelian course of study: logic and philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. This despite the fact that philosophers nowadays recognise subfields of their discipline that had no place in the Aristotelian curriculum.
This is sensible enough for areas where the Islamic tradition has little to say. It isn’t clear that a specialist in, say, decision theory, existentialism, or philosophy of quantum mechanics – even one with historical sensibilities – is missing out on a lot by not knowing Arabic or Persian. (Although, never say never.) But for many subdisciplines that have emerged in more recent times, the Islamic world offers riches. This has not gone unnoticed when it comes to such topics as philosophy of religion. But other areas would reward increased attention, such as aesthetics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of medicine. The present volume will, it is hoped, show that philosophy of law deserves a place on that list. Indeed, legal theory was an obvious choice for inclusion in the new series of which this book is a part. The series as a whole will look at various aspects of Islamic culture, investigating their intrinsic philosophical significance and also the question of how these cultural phenomena interacted with, and exerted influence upon, philosophy taken in the strict sense. Other planned volumes will, for instance, be looking at philosophy in the context of Arabic grammar and linguistics, poetry, translations, and mysticism.
Why is jurisprudence such an obvious candidate for this broader approach? First, because so many authors of the Islamic world contributed to both philosophy and jurisprudence. It is easy to reel off a list of famous names from whom we have both philosophical and juridical works: al-Ghazālī, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī leap readily to mind, and the first two feature heavily in the present volume. Ulrich Rudolph looks at al-Ghazālī’s treatments of the sciences and the place of jurisprudence within these classifications. He argues that al-Ghazālī offers no truly explicit answer to the question of how practical philosophy relates to the study of law, but that his works opened the way for later authors to answer that question. Ibn Rushd is far more forthcoming here, as established in Ziad Bou Akl’s paper, which conversely addresses the legal status of philosophy itself. Central figures of the classical period (roughly, the third ‒ sixth centuries AH, ninth‒twelfth centuries AD) who are not particularly known for their connection to jurisprudence, like al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), were in fact well aware of developments in that field and developed their own thought with an eye to contemporary legal concerns. This is shown below in the contributions of Feriel Bouhafa and Hannah Erlwein.
As for the post-classical period, the madrasa educational system meant that nearly all authors who are of interest to the historian of philosophy at least enjoyed some training in jurisprudence. To take one particularly celebrated period, this would apply to Mullā Ṣadrā and other Safavid philosophers. (Ṣadrā called his own teacher Mīr Dāmād “lord (sayyid) of philosophers and the master of the jurists.”) Or, to take a more understudied period, the dars-i niẓāmī curriculum devised in Islamic India gave young scholars a formation in logic as they worked towards a possible career as jurists. In the nineteenth century Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (d. 1400/1890) duly integrated jurisprudence into his curriculum of the sciences, which was still organised on broadly Aristotelian principles.
Just as figures we usually classify as philosophers often had legal interests, so significant jurists often made philosophical contributions. The genre of works devoted to the “principles of jurisprudence” (uṣūl al-fiqh) is the closest thing we have in Islamic civilization to a sustained reflection on philosophy of law. Accordingly, a number of the papers collected here look either at debates within uṣūl al-fiqh or at the writings of significant authors in the history of this genre. Few were more significant than al-Shāfiʿī, founder of an eponymous legal tradition that became one of the four main schools of Sunnī jurisprudence. As Georges Tamer shows in his contribution, al-Shāfiʿī’s poetry reflects ethical concerns, as he develops an ascetic – one might say “stoic,” in a non-technical sense – worldview that is intended to shield the believer from the disappointments brought by change and the passage of time. A later author who is primarily classified as a jurist, Ibn Taymiyya, is well known for having engaged with philosophy, especially with his notorious critique of logic. In the present volume Jon Hoover finds that he too has something to contribute to the history of ethics in the Islamic world and can be seen as a forerunner of utilitarianism, something that has been suggested also with respect to Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.
Alongside ethical questions, the most philosophically rewarding debates in the Islamic legal tradition have to do with legal reasoning. Here we are dealing with issues of relevance to logic and meta-ethics, which are extensively represented in the papers collected below. Some contributors have chosen to focus on just one figure to illuminate the connections between juridical reasoning and logic. Joep Lameer discusses the famous Ẓāhirī jurist Ibn Ḥazm, who, like his fellow Andalusian Ibn Rushd or, somewhat further east, Ibn Taymiyya and Fakhr al-Dīn, should be familiar to both historians of philosophy and historians of law. Lameer points out that the classification of actions as impermissible, permissible, and obligatory is closely parallel to the three core notions of modal logic, namely impossible, possible, and necessary. Remarkably Ibn Ḥazm has noticed this too and shows that the rules governing modal inferences in Aristotelian logic can thus be transposed to a legal context.
We have already observed that madrasa education required fledgling jurists to become acquainted with logic. So it is unsurprising that as we move forward in history, many authors begin to deploy logical tools – especially those they found in the massively influential Ibn Sīnā – in their analyses of legal reasoning. A second paper on al-Ghazālī, by Felicitas Opwis, gives us one example. She shows how for him logic is a crucial tool for jurists quite generally, and can be used to validate reasoning by analogy in particular. As she points out this would have been suggested to him by the fact that the Arabic word qiyās was used both for analogical arguments in law and syllogisms in Aristotelian logic. Nora Kalbarczyk looks more broadly at how a number of uṣūlīs (that is, authors who write on uṣūl al-fiqh), engaged with Avicennan logic to evaluate an argument pattern we can call argumentum e contrario, “argument from the contrary.” For instance, if we have a rule that tax is owed on sheep that are not free-grazing, does that mean it is not to be paid on sheep that are free-grazing?
[…]
Obviously the goal of this volume is not to offer a complete survey of figures or topics for which legal and philosophical concerns coincide. To the contrary, it is hoped that the reader will come away with the sense that the interrelation of law and philosophy is nearly pervasive in Islamic culture, and that a more or less indefinite amount of research could be devoted to similar topics in various chronological periods and geographical regions. While the contributions do, as we’ve seen, range fairly widely in terms of chronology, and touch on both Shīʿī and Sunnī legal thought – and with Ibn Ḥazm even Ẓāhirism, not just the mainstream schools – it would be easy to think of major topics that go unmentioned here. In particular, the volume does not include any study of the interplay between law and philosophy among Christian or Jewish authors in the Islamic world, even though this too would be a promising direction for enquiry. (Just consider that Maimonides was simultaneously the most important legal and philosophical mind of medieval Judaism.) Nor do the papers included here touch on contemporary developments. So this is far from an exhaustive inquiry of the fascinating and far-reaching connections between philosophy and law in the Islamic world. It would perhaps be too pessimistic, to conclude with Socrates and al-Shāfiʿī (quoted by Tamer below), that “the more I know, the more I know that I know nothing.” But when it comes to the complex connections between these two disciplines, it seems likely that the more we know, the more we will realise that we don’t know everything.
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