Early Maliki Law: Ibn [[blank].sup.[subset]]Abd al-Hakam and his Major Compendium of Jurisprudence.

• Author: Lowry, Joseph
• Position: Reviews of Books

Early Maliki Law: Ibn [[blank].sup.[subset]]Abd al-Hakam and his Major Compendium of Jurisprudence. By JONATHAN E. BROCKOPP. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, vol. 14. Leiden: BRILL, 2000. Pp. xx + 312

For scholars of early Maliki law, it is surely the best of times, as evidenced by the appearance of yet another fine book that adds to both the growing corpus of editions of ancient Maliki legal texts and the secondary literature on early Malikism. In Early Maliki Law (EML), Jonathan Brockopp contextualizes, presents, and translates two chapters from al-Mukhtasar al-kabir fi al-fiqh of [[blank].sup.[subset]]Abdallah b. [[blank].sup.[subset]]Abd al-Hakam (IAH, d. 214/ 829). Although EML is, in a way, constructed around Brockopp's edition of the Mukhtasar's chapters on the mukatab and the umm walad (using fragments that survive in collections in the Azhar, Gotha, and Fez), Brockopp's discussion is hardly confined to the technical details of these two particular forms of slave emancipation. For example, in chapter three Brockopp tackles the literary-theoretical issue of whether interpretation is constrained by anything in texts (pp. 119-21). If meaning resides solely in "communities of response" (p. 121) and not in texts, then how can one use ancient documents (the [Qur.sup.[contains]]an, for example) for historical research? This is hardly a trivial question, but it seems to me that Brockopp's decision to edit an ancient text makes it a moot point. Even Stanley Fish, whose "interpretive nihilism" (121 n. 18) seems to have occasioned Brockopp's engagement with this topic, denies that his views have any consequences for interpretive practice (see Fish's "Consequences" in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies [Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1989], 3 15-41). (1) Still, this gives some indication of the breadth of Brockopp's approach to his topic.

Brockopp's study of IAH's life in chapter one, detailing his family background, scholarly career, and political activities, is a welcome contribution to our knowledge of the Muslim scholarly elite in Egypt in the second-third/eighth-ninth centuries. As Brockopp rightly points out, the advantage of studying such a figure is that his biography has largely escaped the hagiographic tendencies associated with the lives of more prominent early religious figures. He also throws new light on the life of IAH's acquaintance Muhammad b. Idris al-[Shafi.sup.[subset]]i. Particularly interesting is the suggestion that [Shafi.sup.[subset]]i was regarded, at least by some Egyptians, as pro-[[blank].sup.[subset]]Abbasid.

Two small details could be added to the account of the relationship between [Shafi.sup.[subset]]i and the [[blank].sup.[subset]]Abd al-Hakam family. First, Brockopp notes that "one account records that Ibn [[blank].sup.[subset]] al-Hakam was named executor of...