Die Rechtsbucher des Qairawaners Sahnun b. Sa'id: Entstehungsgeschichte und Werkuberlieferung.

• Author: Lowry, Joseph E.
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Die Rechtsbucher des Qairawaners Sahnun b. Sa'id: Entstehungsgeschichte und Werkuberlieferung. By MIKLOS MURANYI. ABHANDLUNGEN FUR DIE KUNDE DES MORGENLANDES, VOL. 52.3. STUTTGART: DEUTSCHE MORGENLANDISCHE GESELLSCHAFT, KOMMISSIONSVERLAG FRANZ STEINER, 1999. Pp. xviii + 196, plates.

In this study Muranyi examines two collections of ancient manuscripts and assesses their significance for the transmission of a major ninth-century legal text, the Mudawwana of the North African jurist Sahnun b. Sa'id (240/854). Muranyi's is very much a book for specialists, but it also bears on larger questions relating to textuality and the transmission of knowledge in pre- and early medieval Islamic civilization. The book consists of a foreword, an introduction, and three chapters. The first concerns Sahnun's primary sources, the second outlines the transmission of the Mudawwana/Mukhtalita in the third and fourth Islamic centuries in North Africa and Spain, and the third describes the activity of commenting on the Mudawwana in the fourth and fifth Islamic centuries and is followed by a brief conclusion.

Muranyi combed through "several thousand" parchment sheets that survive in the mosque library of Qayrawan. Consisting of complete and partial ajza' from Sahnun's Mudawwana and Mukhtalita, these range in date from the second half of the third through the fifth Islamic centuries. He traces the history of these texts, using their colophons and extensive marginalia, back to the time of Sahnun's students. Muranyi has also studied a large number of parchment manuscripts and fragments preserved mostly in the Qarawiyin mosque library in Fez. Often comprising complete codices of the Mudawwana, these date to the late fifth and early sixth Islamic centuries and stem, mostly, from al-Andalus.

Muranyi first revises the traditional account, accepted by modern scholars, of the origins of the Mudawwana and Mukhtalita (for which, see, e.g., GAS I, 465). According to Muranyi, the Mudawwana contains masa'il transmitted by Sahnun from Malik's student Ibn al-Qasim (d. 191/806), but with the addition by Sahnun of some other early Maliki materials as well as his own commentary. The title Mukhtalita refers to a masa'il collection going back to Sahnun which resembles the Mudawwana in content but differs from it in structure. Muranyi refutes the notion that materials transmitted by Asad b. Furat (d. 213/828), a Hanafi judge in Qayrawan who also seems to have studied with Ibn al-Qasim...