Maslaha and the Purpose of the Law: Islamic Discourse on Legal Change from the 4th/10th to 8th/14th Century.

• Author: Powers, Paul R.
• Position: Book review

Maslaha and the Purpose of the Law: Islamic Discourse on Legal Change from the 4th/10th to 8th/14th Century. By FELICITAS OPWIS. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, vol. 31. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Pp. xiv + 370. $197.

The question of how Islamic legal discourses accommodate change is not easily answered, especially given that jurists tend to hide their tracks in this regard, preferring the impression that God's law is immutable. Felicitas Opwis's excellent and important book sheds light on some of the reasons for and means of accommodating change at the level of Islamic legal theory. Given the subject matter, this is, of course, a rather technical study, not especially easy to read or to summarize, but the technical detail is necessary and presented about as clearly as one could hope for, and the reader is rewarded with real insight into the historical development of Islamic legal reasoning. The main themes and some of the detail will be familiar to readers of Opwis's several other publications on related topics. But this thorough and careful book serves to anchor those other studies and will stand as a major contribution to the scholarship on Islamic legal theory and intellectual history.

The book consists of a detailed table of contents, an introduction, five substantive chapters, and a conclusion, along with several tables and diagrams to clarify technical detail, a bibliography, and an index. The overriding method is careful exposition of a chronological series of jurists whose work contributed significantly to the development of thinking about maslaha. While long passages of translation are relatively few, the book still provides a detailed guide to the works in question.

The introduction efficiently lays out the central concerns of the book. Underlying much of usul al-fiqh in general, and considerations of maslaha in particular, is the question of "how to apply the finite body of the authoritative legal texts to the infinite number of possible legal incidents" (p. 1). Jurists of multiple eras, theological positions, and madhhab affiliations sought to maintain the relevance of Islamic law under changing circumstances (though as Opwis notes, Hanafis, for various reasons, did not factor significantly in the development of maslaha). The book is not offered as a comprehensive theory or history of change in Islamic law, but as a focused exploration of how, in discourses of legal theory, one particular term and an attendant set of issues influenced jurists' efforts to accommodate change. Opwis is guided by four interrelated questions: "the delineation between religious and secular law, the theological implications of extending God's law, the epistemic value of rulings derived on the basis of maslaha, and preponderance of rulings entailing maslaha" (p. 6). Opwis also consistently considers the implications of taking inductive or deductive...