Die Anfange der islamischen Jurisprudenz: Ihre Entwicklung in Mekka bis zur Mitte des 2./8. Jahrhunderts.

• Author: Schneider, Irene

Since the publication of Schacht's The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence in 1950 various contributions to the subject have appeared in the West, most of them in support of Schacht's views on the formation of Islamic jurisprudence. Motzki's Anfange poses a challenge to some of these generally accepted views.

Motzki sets out to investigate the beginnings of Islamic jurisprudence and its development in Mecca up to the 2nd/8th century. The book is divided into four chapters, an epilogue, a bibliography and an index of names and important terms.

The first chapter contains a historical account of the contributions to the study of the development of Islamic law, mainly focusing on Schacht's theories and the subsequent discussions it generated. Already at this juncture Motzki makes clear that he will try to revise in part Schacht's account of the formation of Islamic jurisprudence. While, for Schacht, only ray (`personal opinion') produced legal solutions up to the emergence of Islamic law in the middle of the 2nd century, Motzki is convinced that the beginning of Islamic law should properly be dated some 50 to 75 years earlier. He criticizes Schacht's theory of the artificial growth of the asanid, which implies that the most complete asanid going back to the Prophet and the Companions are always the latest ones. Schacht had thus been led to the conclusion that it is idle to try to reconstruct the tendencies and characteristics of the doctrine of any particular Companion and of the Prophet from the traditions attributed to them.

Motzki's book is an attempt to show that in spite of the well known problems of authenticity stated by Schacht it is possible to reconstruct the early history of Islamic law from somewhat later sources. To substantiate his claim he proposes to investigate the Musannaf, an earlier hadit-book, by the Yemenite author Abdarrazzaq al-San ani (d. 211), which was not available to Schacht, and was published later.

Chapter two is devoted to a careful consideration of Abdarrazzaq's work. Motzki examines the main transmitters of this book: Ma mar, Ibn Guraig, Tauri and Ibn Uyaina, identifying also their sources. He comes to two important conclusions. First, the Musannaf itself is based on older reliable sources, none of which have survived but can be reconstructed through the asanid; and second, the edited version (Beirut 1972, [1983.sup.2]) should be considered as being nearly identical with that originally compiled by Abdarrazzaq...