Studies in Legal Hadith.

• Author: Lucas, Scott

Studies in Legal Hadith. By HIROYUKI YANAGIHASHI. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, vol. 47. Leiden: BRILL, 2019. Pp. xvi + 612. $179, [euro]149.

In Studies in Legal Hadith, Hiroyuki Yanagihashi takes the isnad-cum-matn method of Harald Motzki and Gregor Schoeler to a new level by applying it to a large set of narrations of seven clusters of Sunni legal hadith. The book contains a dazzling array of graphs, diagrams, and charts, along with a complex system for labeling the myriad hadiths it discusses. By choosing to focus on the difficult question of how hadith variants entered traditionist networks and became recorded in written hadith collections, the author necessarily restricts his inquiry to the first three centuries of Islam. In short, this book is a study of early legal hadith.

Yanagihashi's dataset of approximately two thousand narrations of seven clusters of legal hadith is carefully chosen to include both acts of worship and civil law. These clusters revolve around the following statements or actions ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad that are found in numerous hadith collections:

1. "Nothing makes water impure."

2. Some Companions fasted while traveling with the Prophet, while others did not.

3. The Prophet told Ka'b b. 'Ujra, who was suffering from lice on the minor pilgrimage ('umra), to slaughter a sheep, fast for three days, or feed six needy people.

4. The Prophet annulled the marriage of a woman whose father had married her off without her consent to someone she disliked.

5. "Gold for gold, silver for silver, wheat for wheat, barley for barley, dates for dates, salt for salt, similar for similar, like for like, and hand to hand" (this is a well-known hadith regarding riba, usury).

6. Hadith that originated in the Constitution of Medina.

7. "Whoever takes a false oath in order to seize property [belonging to someone else] will meet God when He is angry with him."

Yanagihashi calls each hadith cluster a hadith in italics, while he uses the romanized word to refer to individual narrations within each cluster. Each chapter consists of 97-473 variants of the hadith under analysis (p. 12), which the author codes according to its thematic elements. While this degree of accuracy is praiseworthy, it does result in nomenclature that can be difficult to follow. To pick a random example, the author writes: "To return to the hadith [8-3.TSPI[Q.sub.2]] cited above, apparently this is a composite hadith in which hadith [8-3.IQ], narrated by Ibn...