Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity.

• Author: Rippin, Andrew
• Position: Book Review

Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity. By MARION HOLMES KATZ. SUNY Series in Medieval Middle East History. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2002. Pp. viii + 275 (paper).

In this revised University of Chicago dissertation, Marion Katz provides a detailed examination of Muslim purity laws, their implications, and early development. The form of the presentation and the information provided is compelling. The introduction to the work provides a survey of the theories related to the origin and explanation of the purity requirements in Islam, and in religion in general, from the early theories of Wellhausen and Wensinck through those of Douglas. The point that such requirements must "make sense" and be coherent is accepted by Katz, but she argues that such reasons must be apparent to those who construct the rules. That is, a theory must be able to predict data other than that upon which the theory was built. For this reason, she views the analysis of Reinhart, who argues that loss and reassertion of bodily "control" is the governing factor in the purity laws, as flawed since it does not account for the details of Islamic law beyond those upon which the theory is built (e.g., the attitude to incontinence cannot be accounted for).

Katz is primarily interested in the history of the emergence of Islamic law. Rather than construct a master narrative in the mode of Schacht and Calder, Katz focuses on the specifics of one area of Islamic law--purity--to discover the processes related to the fundamental motif of Islamic law, that is, the reconciliation of practice with the text of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and the sunna. However, a master narrative is present in the book's thrust towards defining a socio-political context in late Umayyad times as the time of juristic debate and innovation. This is accomplished by a method which treats hadith anecdotes as discrete units potentially providing historical data (or, at least, a historical context) and utilizes them devoid of any literary context in which they might be found. The reader of Katz's book will get no sense of what the books in which the source material is found are like; for Katz, the sources consist of undifferentiated masses of reports seemingly thrown together. That said, this is a book of considerable interest and it provides a fascinating exploration of its topic.

In chapter one, Katz examines the context of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]...