Das Kitab al-Amwal des Abu 'Ubaid al-Qasim b. Sallam: Entstehung und Uberlieferung eines fruh-islamischen Rechtswerkes.

• Author: Lowry, Joseph E.
• Position: Book review

Das Kitab al-Amwal des Abu 'Ubaid al-Qasim b. Sallam: Entstehung und Uberlieferung eines fruh-islamischen Rechtswerkes. By ANDREAS GORKE. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 22. Princeton: DARWIN PRESS, 2003. Pp. ix + 204.

Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim ibn Sallam (ca. 154/770-224/838), the son of a Byzantine slave in Herat, forged a career for himself as a noted scholar and jurist, even making the acquaintance of the 'Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun. Abu 'Ubayd also left behind several works on aspects of law and language, one of which, the Kitab al-amwal (hereinafter "Amwal"), probably inspired in part by his two decades as a judge in recently conquered Tarsus, concerns tax law. Andreas Gorke, in this useful and important study, investigates the history of Abu 'Ubayd's Amwal, using it as a test-case for the all-important question: how can we know that seemingly early works are in fact what they purport to be?

The barriers to such knowledge are many, as Gorke recognizes. Most early Arabic texts are not available in autographs, or even in early manuscripts, but instead in manuscripts copied centuries--sometimes many centuries--later (pp. 2-3). Moreover, additions, redaction by students, promulgation of students' lecture notes as works by the teacher, variant transmissions, later processes of redaction, and false or uncertain ascription are all attested phenomena in the early history of Arabic writing (pp. 3-17). Particularly in the case of works that offer collections of traditions (ahadith, athar) and narrative reports (akhbar), such as the Amwal, later addition or deletion of discrete text-units can be extremely difficult to detect, and most early genres of writing (for example, fiqh, hadith, tarikh, tafsir) consist of such text-units.

All these difficulties are compounded by factors relating to the transition from orality to writing. Texts that may have begun life as oral compilations came to be written down, and texts that may have begun life as written documents were subject to the vicissitudes of oral transmission. In addition, ideological factors led to a continued privileging of oral transmission for some kinds of texts. Also, as Gregor Schoeler has pointed out, some texts came into being out of what were in effect lecture notes and must be distinguished from texts that were given a final, definitive written form by an author. A further complication is presented--in this reviewer's estimation--by the likelihood that the progress of writing as a...