Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Studies in Honor of Farhart J. Ziadeh.

• Author: Spectrosky, Susan A.

In May, 1987, a conference on Islamic law and jurisprudence was held at the University of Washington to honor Farhat J. Ziadeh on the occasion of his retirement. This volume contains the papers presented at that conference, as well as a brief biographical sketch of Professor Ziadeh and his bibliography. For publication, the papers have been expanded into articles and grouped in three topical sections; Islamic jurisprudence, Islamic law and its relation to the West, and Islamic law in the modem period. All eleven of the articles are informative in themselves, and they also work well together to provide an overview of the kind of research currently in progress in the whole field of Islamic law.

The articles on Islamic jurisprudence deal with the medieval period. In "On Inductive Corroboration, Probability and Certainty in Sunni Legal Theory," Wael Hallaq starts by discussing the problem of certainty which is based on the testimony of witnesses in court. Second, he explores a number of questions related to the kind of knowledge that can be acquired through mutawatir reports. This in turn leads to a discussion of different components of tawatur. Finally, Hallaq describes the way in which the jurist Abu Ishag al-Shatibi (d. 790/1388) based his theory of usul al-fiqh on inductive principles. This is a dense article, and Hallaq's ample annotations will readily allow the reader to look further into any portion of it.

In "Interpretation of the Divine Command in the Jurisprudence of Muwaffaq al-Din Ibn Qudama," Jeanette Wakin starts by providing the context of Ibn Qudama's arguments. Muslim jurists were concerned with developing methods that would lead to the establishment of standards for evaluating individual human acts in accordance with God's determination of the moral value of each of these acts. Questions arose about how we can know what God's determination is, and whether our human knowledge of it is certain or probable. For, even though we have certain knowledge of the authenticity of revelation through the Qur an and Sunna, we cannot have certain knowledge of the correctness of any particular interpretation of the revealed texts. Therefore, how is it possible to determine the status of an act performed in response to a divine command? An attempt to answer this question requires in turn an understanding of the divine command. Wakin devotes the major portion of her article to explaining and commenting upon the discussion of divine command in...