This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of Sh?fi 's "Ris?la" and shows how Sh?fi sought to formulate an all-embracing hermeneutic that portrays the law as a tightly interlocking structure organized around defined interactions of the Qur n and the Sunna.

The Risāla of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), the earliest preserved work of Islamic legal theory, has been understood in previous scholarship as either the elaboration of a hierarchy of sources of law (Qurʾān, Sunna, consensus, and analogical reasoning) or an extended defense of the Sunna. Through a careful rereading of this celebrated text, this book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the Risāla, in which Shāfiʿī formulated an all-encompassing hermeneutic that portrays the law as a tightly interlocking structure organized around defined interactions of the Qurʾān and the Sunna. Topics covered include Shāfiʿī’s creative account of the law’s architectonics, hermeneutical techniques, legal epistemology, relationship to kalām, and the role of consensus (ijmāʿ).

This volume contains ground-breaking studies on such matters as the early development of legal theory in Islam, the emergence of "us l al-fiqh," theory vis-a-vis practice, various controversies among Muslim theorists, the construction of juristic authority, reformist concepts, and the role of "qaw cid."

Wael B. Hallaq has already established himself as one of the most eminent scholars in the field of Islamic law. In this book, first published in 1997, the author traces the history of Islamic legal theory from its early beginnings until the modern period. Initially, he focuses on the early formation of this theory, analysing its central themes and examining the developments which gave rise to a variety of doctrines. He concludes with a discussion of modern thinking about the theoretical foundations and methodology of Islamic law. In organisation, approach to the subject and critical apparatus, the book will be an essential tool for the understanding of Islamic legal theory in particular and Islamic law in general. This, in combination with an accessibility of language and style, will guarantee a readership among students and scholars and anyone interested in Islam and its evolution.

A modern translation of a foundational document of Islamic jurisprudence The Epistle on Legal Theory is the oldest surviving Arabic work on Islamic legal theory and the foundational document of Islamic jurisprudence. Its author, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 204/820), was the eponym of the Shafi'i school of legal thought, one of the four rites in Sunni Islam. This fascinating work offers the first systematic treatment in Arabic of key issues in Islamic legal thought. These include a survey of the importance of Arabic as the language of revelation, principles of textual interpretation to be applied to the Qur'an and prophetic Traditions, techniques for harmonizing apparently contradictory precedents, legal epistemology, rules of inference, and discussions of when legal interpretation is required. The author illustrates his theoretical claims with numerous examples drawn from nearly all areas of Islamic law, including ritual law, commercial law, tort law, and criminal law. The text thus provides an important window into both Islamic law and legal thought in particular and early Islamic intellectual history in general. The Arabic text has been established on the basis of the two most important critical editions and includes variants in the notes, while the English text is a new translation by a leading scholar of Shafi'i and his thought. The Epistle on Legal Theory represents one of the earliest complete works on Islamic law, one that is centrally important for the formation of Islamic legal thought and the Islamic legal tradition. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

This volume addresses the structural interrelations of Islamic theoretical and practical legal reasoning, based on an analysis of six works of Islamic jurisprudence by authors who lived in Uzbekistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria between 970 and 1600 CE.

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.