Kitab al-Luma' fi usul al-fiqh (Le Livre des Rais illuminant les fondements de la comprehension de la Loi): Traite de theorie legale musulmane.

• Author: Stewart, Devin
• Position: Book Review

By ERIC CHAUMONT. Studies in Comparative Legal History. Berkeley: ROBBINS COLLECTION PUBLICATIONS, SCHOOL OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, 1999. Pp. xi + 432.

This publication is an important contribution to Islamic and comparative legal studies, being one of the few integral works of Islamic legal theory to be translated into a European language. The author of the original work, Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi (393-476/1003-83) was one of the foremost Shafi'i jurists of the fifth/eleventh century, and is well known as the inaugural professor of law at the first madrasah in history, the Nizamiyah of Baghdad, as the compiler of a widely used biographical dictionary of jurists, and as the author of frequently commented legal works in the Shafi'i tradition. Kitab al-Luma' fi usul al-fiqh is al-Shirazi's shortest work on usul al-fiqh, or jurisprudence; it likely served as the basic text for his lectures, while his own commentary on the work probably represents his lecture notes. The translation here is based not on the early edition of al-Na'sani (Cairo, 1908), but on a critical edition completed by Chaumont in 1993-94 using four MSS: 'Atif Effendi 657/2 (Istanbul), Maktabat al-Asad al-Wataniyah 2837 and 2838 (Damascus), and Universitatsbibliothek Leipzig 339 (Leipzig). The translation is supplemented by an introduction that provides an overview of works on Islamic jurisprudence and the life and legal thought of al-Shirazi. It also includes a bibliography and indices of Qur'anic citations, hadith citations, general items, primarily names of persons and groups, and concepts. The bibliography, arranged topically, is excellent and particularly useful for the scholar of Islamic law and legal theory.

The translation is not as readable as one might hope. For a number of reasons, it is much too long; the concise Arabic text, 126 pages in the first edition, ends up extending well over three hundred pages in the translation (pp. 33-365). Much of the length is due to over-zealous footnotes which, given the smaller typeface, easily surpass the original text in length. These footnotes, which paraphrase extensively from al-Shirazi's own commentary, explain, for example, who al-Shafi'i and Abu Hanifah were (88 n. 141; 202 n. 56) although this should be obvious from the introduction, and tell the reader, among other things, that the original meaning of hadd "definition," a common term that requires no particular explanation, is 'obstacle' or 'empechement'...