Die Entstehung der juristischen Hermeneutik (usul al-fiqh) im fruhen Islam.

• Author: Shamsy, Ahmed El
• Position: Book review

Die Entstehung der juristischen Hermeneutik (usul al-fiqh) im fruhen Islam. By HANS-THOMAS TILLSCHNEIDER. Arbeitsmaterialien zum Orient, 20. Wurzburg: ERGON, 2006. Pp. x + 220. [euro]30.

The great questions animating the modern study of the Islamic sacred texts have thus far been primarily concerned with issues of origin and authenticity. The assumption that has frequently under-pinned such studies is that the interpretation of the texts, once these had been established, naturally took the form characteristic of classical Muslim scholarship. Accordingly, Joseph Schacht and John Wansbrough concluded that the hadith and the Quran, respectively, must be of later provenance than conventionally assumed, given that early Muslim jurists failed to use these texts in the manner of later scholars, namely, as the exclusively authoritative sources of religious norms. The intrinsic premise is that there could be only one way to view and use the sacred texts. This paradigm gives rise to a dichotomy between, on the one hand, the fluidity of religious teaching at the oral stage, which accommodates change and manipulation but also precludes a reliable historiography, and, on the other hand, stable written texts that are timeless and unchanging in both form and interpreted content.

Outside of Islamic studies, however, recent decades have witnessed growing interest in the ways in which the significance of written texts can change within societal contexts and how such changes affect the use and interpretation of the texts. Most central to this path of inquiry has been the investigation of processes of canonization, which invest certain texts with particular forms of authority at moments of communal crisis and transformation. In the past few years, these theoretical insights have been brought to the study of Islam by a new generation of scholars with fascinating results. Particularly noteworthy are Jonathan Brown's study The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim (Leiden, 2007, based on Brown's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, 2006), and Hans-Thomas Tillschneider's book, reviewed here, which originates in a 2004 Master's thesis at the University of Freiburg.

Tillschneider's work presents an in-depth study of the early exegetical usage of the dichotomy between general (amm) and restricted (khass) expressions in Islamic legal hermeneutics, and interprets the evolution of this discourse as a process of canonization. Chapter one traces the development of the words 'amm and khass and subtly shows how they gradually came to be employed as technical terms. The author locates the origins of this word pair in theological attempts to deal with the apparent contradiction between the two Quranic themes of divine forgiveness of all sins and threats of hellfire for transgressors. The two basic responses to this problem were either to postulate a strong default assumption that general expressions apply to every member of the indicated class (qawl bi-l-umum...