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e Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress. Edited by Peri Bearman, Rudolph Peters, Frank Vogel. Harvard Series in Islamic Law, 2. Cambridge, MA: Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School. Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii + 300. ISBN 0-674-01784-6. $39.95. is collection of essays represents an important contribution to the study of a central Islamic institution, the madhhab or school of law, in pre-modern and modern Islam.1 e chapters range from legal developments in the 2nd/8th century to the present and, in geographical terms, from the Middle East and Central Asia to Spain, on the one hand, and Indonesia, on the other. Most of the attention is devoted to the Sunn schools of law, though there is a chapter on the hirs of al-Andalus and one on the late classical Imm Sha. e volume also provides a substantial discussion of how the madhhab has fared in modern Islam. Peri Bearman and Frank Vogel begin the book with a brief overview of the evolution of the madhhab, followed by an account, by Bernard Weiss, of conceptions and forms of authority in Islamic legal theory. As Weiss observes, pre-modern scholars tended to view the madhhab as a body of doctrine articulated by master jurists (mujtahids), with the understanding that all thoseboth jurists and lay peoplewho were themselves incapable of toiling over the authoritative texts needed to follow (taqld) those who had demonstrated such an ability. is view had intellectual as well as social consequences. e fact that only the few can be mujtahids and that many must be their followers sets up a hierarchy of roles that is fundamental to Muslim thinking about the place of the mujtahid within the social order and represents an important rst step in the containment of disorder in the law (p. 3). But if recognizing the authority of the master jurists was crucial to the development and coherence of the legal tradition, it scarcely precluded continuing advances in legal thought, not infrequently in the form of explicit disagreement with earlier views. In his excellent study of the anaf madhhab as it existed in the 4th/10th century, Eyyup Kaya draws attention to the existence of signicant regional variation among anaf scholars based in Iraq, Balkh, and Bukhara. ese scholars and their followers frequently privileged the doctrines that had developed within their geographical centers over those from other anaf locales, and it was not uncommon for them to diverge even from the opinions of the schools founding fathers. is regional variation raises the question, of course, of whether one can legitimately speak of a anaf madhhab at this time. Kaya answers it in the armative, arguing that a anaf identity had come to consist in continuous scholarly engagement with the juristic past. ere are anafs such as al-Karkh who rejected the typical opinions of Ab anfa, Kaya writes, or those, such as Abul-Qsim al-ar of 10th-century Balkh, who disagreed with Ab anfa on thousands of
1)

e term madhhab is not italicized in this volume, and this review follows it in this convention.
DOI: 10.1163/156851908X413784

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009

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issues, but there was not one anaf who did not take the anaf juristic tradition as a legal source (p. 39). A similar point is made by Robert Gleave in his discussion of how the late classical Imm jurists viewed their own madhhab. e Imm legal tradition is, like others, cumulative, with the jurists not only adhering to the doctrines handed down to them from earlier authorities but also continuing to sift through them, striving to resolve their ambiguities, and arguing over how to rank and reorganize them in relation to one another. As in any traditional culture, a great deal of the scholarly acumen was seen to consist in navigating the complexities of this tradition while adapting it to new imperatives. Even ijtihd, which had a considerably richer history in pre-modern Imm law than it didat least in terms of formal claims to itin contemporaneous Sunn circles, was a matter not of bypassing this inherited tradition but of delving deeper into it. Indeed, as Gleave observes, a major part of the mujtahid s knowledge [was recognized to consist] of bibliographic skills (p. 136; emphasis added). Gleave also argues that, for all their criticism of the Ul jurists and of their ijtihd, the Akhbrs, who sought to base their views directly on the teachings of the Prophet and the imms, also showed considerable reverence for many earlier jurists and continued to engage with their work. In this sense, the Akhbrs, too, were part of the Imm legal tradition. And inasmuch as it is this juristic past that constituted a madhhab, even the Akhbrs were not anti-madhhab, as they are sometimes characterized. A number of essays in this collection attend not only to how a madhhab evolved in terms of doctrine, but also to the social and political contexts in which it did so. Examining the Umayyad madhhab of al-Awz (d. 157/774) and Sufyn al-awr (161/778), Steven Judd argues that its demise had much to do with the rise of the Abbsids, the dynasty that replaced the Umayyads in 132/750. Al-Awz came to have reasonably good relations with Abbsid authorities whereas al-awr died while in hiding from them. While these two gures had shared much in terms of their legal approach, their contrasting political trajectories posed problems for their followers, accentuated by their having to decidein line with evolving conceptions of a madhhab as being rooted in the doctrines of an eponymous gurewhether one followed al-Awz or al-awr. Judds broader argument is that the early history of this and other madhhabs is best studied not with reference to the neat but often misleading regional and eponymous paradigms [but rather by] simply asking who associated with whom and what views and loyalties these circles of scholars shared (p. 25). Unsurprisingly, even the madhhabs that turned out to be successful in the long run had uncertain beginnings and long exhibited considerable uidity in their relations with other evolving schools. e development of the institution of the madrasa may have helped consolidate school boundaries in some measure, as Daphna Ephrat suggests in her study on 5th/11th century Baghdad. Yet as Daniella Talmon-Heller shows in her study of 6th/12th-7th/13th century Syria, these boundaries were anything but impermeable and delity to the madhhab often

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competed with other loyaltiesethnic, political, and geographic, among others (cf. pp. 108, 114). Alfonso Carmona meticulously delineates the slow and uneven dissemination of the writings of Mlik b. Anas and his students in al-Andalus, and Maribel Fierro shows that it was only in the 4th/10th century, when Mlik legal scholars had become well-entrenched in the Iberian peninsula, that the image of al-Andalus as having been Mlik since Mliks times began to be built (p. 61). ough she arrives at her conclusions quite dierently from the hir scholar Ibn azm (d. 456/1064), she ultimately concurs with him on the major role Umayyad patronage played in the success of the Mlik madhhab in al-Andalus (pp. 67-70). It is a measure of the state-sponsored hegemony of the Mliks that, in the relatively few instances that they served as judges, even the hirs (discussed in this volume by Camilla Adang) were expected to rule according to the norms of the Mlik madhhab. If royal patronage contributed signicantly to the fortunes of some schools of law, developments within a madhhab could, in turn, also position it well for ocial recognition. In an important contribution to this volume, Rudolph Peters shows that anasm was able to play the role of an ocial madhhab under the Ottomans in part because, between the 6th/12th and the 11th/17th centuries, anaf law had come to be increasingly standardized with a relatively clear delineation of what opinions were to be deemed the most authoritative. anaf works such as Ibrhm al-alabs (d. 956/1549) Multaq al-abur and Muammad Shaykhzdes (d. 1078/1667) commentary on it, the Majma al-anhur, were especially inuential compendia of the standard doctrine in Ottoman lands. e existence of such handbooks made it possible for the Ottomans to rationalize judicial administration in their realm, both by giving ocial recognition to what the anaf legal circles had themselves come to see as their authoritative norms and by stipulating that particular anaf doctrines be followed to the exclusion of certain others. Signicantly, as Peters shows, some of the sultans decrees to this eect also made their way into the anaf legal handbooks. is illustrates not only the symbiotic relationship between Ottoman judicial practice and the anaf madhhab but also the fact that, even in an age of taqld and standardized texts, the legal tradition continued to adapt itself to new pressures and needs. ough Peters does not raise this question, it would be illuminating to examine how the standardization of anaf doctrine under the Ottomans might compare with the career of anasm elsewhere. For instance, the 11th/17th century Fatw Alamgriyya (often called al-Fatw al-Hindiyya), produced under the patronage of the Mughal emperor Awrangzeb lamgr (r. 1068-1118/1658-1707), had also sought to rationalize judicial practice in Mughal India.2 Quite apart from the
2)

Cf. al-Fatw al-Hindiyya f madhhab al-imm al-aam Ab anfa al-Numn, 6 vols. (Beirut, n.d. [1973; reprint of the Bulaq edition, 1310 A.H.]), 1:2-3; also cf. Sq Mustaidd Khn, Mathir-i lamgr, ed. A.A. Al (Osnabrck, 1985; reprint of the Calcutta 1870-73 edition), 529-30.

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question of its actual impact,3 it is worth noting that this compendium of anaf norms gives extensive coverage to the broad range of juristic disagreement that the school tradition had come to recognize by this time. is suggests not only that Mughal judges would have continued to enjoy considerable room for maneuver in drawing on their internally variegated legal tradition but also that the standardization of anaf doctrine may have meant somewhat dierent things in dierent contemporaneous regions. How the institution of the madhhab has fared in conditions of modernity is a question crucial for an understanding of issues of religious authority in the modern world. e contributors to this volume seem to concur that the madhhab does not have much of a future in Islam. Brinkley Messick analyzes a fatwa issued at the turn of the 20th century by a Sh mufti of Singapore on the question of whether it was permissible for Muslims to have their merchandise on European ships insured with non-Muslim insurance companies. ough he ultimately ruled in favor of such insurance, the Sh mufti had not found any clear answer in his own madhhab and had turned, inter alia, to the work of Ibn bidn, the celebrated 19th-century anaf jurist of Damascus, for guidance. e Sh muftis fatwa was then sent to Muammad Rashd Ri (d. 1935), the Salaf journalist-scholar whose inuential journal, al-Manr, carried a regular section devoted to addressing requests for fatwas from across the Muslim world. In formulating his own opinion on this questionwhich was also in favor of such insurance, though on grounds dierent from those on which the Sh mufti had arguedRi drew on the resources of the Islamic legal tradition as a whole, showing himself to be attentive to general considerations of the common good rather than to the norms and methods of any particular madhhab. As Messick sees it, Ris approach, along with the course of action the Sh mufti had adopted, presaged the madhhabs declining fortunes in the modern world. Nor is it only in the face of new questions that many a jurist has been impelled to step beyond his madhhab. Other, often stronger, forces have also been at work. e nation-state has had its own claims to legislation and to the codication of the law; and even when such legislation professes to be guided by the spirit of Islam or by resources from the Islamic legal tradition, it is seldom the doctrinal legacy of any single madhhab that has guided such legislation. In Indonesia, for instance, as discussed by Mark Cammack, there have been persistent calls for the development of an Indonesian madhhab, though the question of precisely what this would entail remains unsettled. If the nation-state has continued to tear at the seams of the madhhab, so have globalization and the new information and communication technologies that go with it. In recent decades, as Ihsan Yilmaz argues in his account of inter-madhhab surng, the boundaries of the madhhab have reached the point of dissolution as countless micro-mujtahids have taken
3)

For one view on this question, see Muzaar Alam, e Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13.

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it upon themselves to nd or provide answers to their questions by, inter alia, drawing indiscriminately on whatever legal opinions are accessible to them and by going back to the foundational Islamic texts for unmediated guidance. Yet, contrary to the sense that emerges from this volume, it is probably premature to write the obituary of the madhhab. If the madhhab has fared poorly in many places, it has also retained considerable vitality in others. Oddly, there is no chapter in this volume on South Asia, a region that houses nearly a third of the worlds Muslim population. ough the anaf madhhab, adhered to by the overwhelming proportion of South Asian Muslims, has undergone signicant changes in colonial and post-colonial times, it is anything but clear that this school of law is on its way to dissolution. On the contrary, anaf scholarship of a strongly partisan color has continued to thrive in circles of ulam, especially those belonging to the Deoband doctrinal orientation.4 A good deal of this scholarship has been produced in response to the Ahl-i adth of India, a Salaf movement whose adherents reject the authority of the schools of law and insist on basing themselves directly on the Qurn and the adth. e I l al-sunan, a twenty-one volume commentary on adth-reports with a primarily legal content, was, for instance, written by a anaf-Deoband scholar to help answer the Ahl-i adth allegation that anaf norms have a rather tenuous basis in adth.5 Yet the scope of anaf scholarship extends beyond the Ahl-i adth challenge, illustrating something of the continuing strength of the anaf school in the Indian subcontinent. Like Singapores Sh mufti discussed by Messick, South Asias anaf scholars have also, on occasion, had to step outside their school tradition.6 In many instances, the ulam have had little choice but to go along with state-sponsored legislative initiatives that have little to do with any madhhab methods or boundaries. Nor are all anaf ulam of contemporary South Asia committed to the regimen of taqld in quite the same way. Indeed, some have become increasingly open to certain forms of ijtihd. is is the case, for instance, with Indias Islamic Fiqh Academy (founded in 1989), which advocates the need for a collective ijtihd as a way of meeting some of the problems facing the Muslims of India. Even so, many of those associated with this institution retain a strong commitment to the

On the history and politics of the Deobandi doctrinal orientation, see Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Muhammad Qasim Zaman, e Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 5) afar Amad Uthmn, I l al-sunan, ed. zim al-Q, 21 vols. (Beirut: Dr al-kutub al-ilmiyya, 1997). 6) Cf. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Ashraf Ali anaw: Islam in Modern South Asia (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008), 57-65.

4)

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anaf madhhab;7 some even profess to see Ab anfa himself as the forbear of collective ijtihd.8 Others are considerably more ambivalent about self-consciously embracing the language of ijtihd. Yet professions of taqld do not necessarily preclude possibilities of legal change, any more than they did among earlier generations of putatively taqld-bound scholars. e point here is not, of course, to dispute the decline of the madhhab in particular contexts (Indias Fiqh Academy itself might well contribute to that decline in the Indian milieu), but to note, rather, that this complex institution continues to follow varied trajectories and that contemporary eorts to rethink legal norms with reference to the madhhab deserve no less attention than do signs of the madhhabs dissolution.9 at modernity itself is best spoken of in the plural, with its diering frames and diering paces, as Messick aptly puts it (p. 161), suggests as much. e precise implications of such dierences, so far as the madhhab and questions of religious authority are concerned, merit much further study. is volume represents a commendable step in that direction. Muhammad Qasim Zaman Princeton University

Cf. Mujhid al-Islm al-Qsim, al-Ijtihd al-ijtim, in Mujhid al-Islm al-Qsim, ed., Buth qhiyya min al-Hind (Beirut: Dr al-kutub al-ilmiyya, 2003), 6-8. al-Qsim (d. 2002), the founding president of the Islamic Fiqh Academy, was a leading Deoband scholar. e current president of the Academy, afr al-Dn Mift, also serves as the chief mufti of the Deoband madrasa. 8) Cf. Muammad Fahm Akhtar Nadw, Tp ke shahr Mysore main Islmic Fiqh Academy India k pandarahwn qh seminar, Tarjumn-i Dr al-Ulm (Delhi), vol. 2, nos. 8-9 (April-May, 2006), 71, 73. 9) For an example of such rethinking in contemporary Indonesia, cf. R. Michael Feener, Muslim Legal ought in Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167.

7)