Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni.

• Author: Griffel, Frank

Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni. By SOHAIRA Z. M. SIDDIQUI. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xiii + 312. $99.99 (cloth), $32.99 (paper), $26 (ebook).

It must be due to the eagerness of publishers to render their products more relevant in the marketplace that books appear with titles claiming to cover a certain phenomenon "in premodern Islam" or, in this case, "under the Abbasids," when in reality these books are mere monographs that analyze the thought of a single scholar. Sohaira Siddiqui's book on the legal and political thought of al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085) shares this shortcoming. It hardly deals with the Abbasids, to whom al-Juwayni himself had no connection. As the head teacher at the earliest Nizamiyya madrasa in Nishapur he was part of the first generation of Seljuq scholars. His close connection to Nizam al-Mulk (d. 485/1092), the powerful vizier who led the affairs of the Great Seljuq empire for almost three decades, shaped his political writings to the extent that he legitimized a caliph neither from the Quraysh nor even an Arab. Here, he prepared his colleagues for a Seljuq Turk claim to the caliphate. What's more, he vaguely suggested that his patron Nizam al-Mulk, who had a Persian lineage, may have been the best contender for the caliph's throne (W. Hallaq, "Caliphs, Jurists and the Saljuqs in the Political Thought of al-Juwayni," Muslim World 74 [1984]: 26-41, at 40). If this sounds like fantasy, one should be reminded that in 484/1092, only a few years after al-Juwaynl's death, the Seljuq sultan Malikshah was determined to remove al-Muqtadi from the caliphate and put one of his own grandsons in his stead--a son of al-Muqtad! from his marriage with Malikshah's daughter (Hallaq 1984: 29). Only the sultan's premature death in a hunting accident saved al-Muqtadf's seat on the throne. Al-Juwayni provided the scholarly foundation for such boldness. As a political thinker, al-Juwayni was not Abbasid but anti-Abbasid.

Siddiqui's monograph began as a PhD thesis on Islamic law at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It focuses on four subjects, each represented in a chapter: (1) a mildly contextualized presentation of al-Juwayni's life, (2) an analysis of the epistemological sections in his two most influential textbooks--on kaldm in al-Irshad and on the methods of Islamic law in al-Burhan, (3) an analysis of the discussion on the sources of the law and on qiyas in al-Burhan, and (4) an analysis of al-Juwayni's treatise on political theory, Ghiyalh al-umam. Siddiqui's main interest lies in al-Juwaynfs construction of how the fuqaha' collectively generate rules for the conduct of...