The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History.

• Author: Stewart, Devin
• Position: Book review

The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. By Ahmed El Shamsy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 253. $90.

Recent years have witnessed several important scholarly contributions devoted to the thought and legacy of the prominent jurist and legal theorist Muhammmad b. Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 204/820), reacting to studies that questioned the early date and influence of his works (particularly Wael Hallaq, "Was al-Shafi'i the Master-Architect of Islamic lurisprudence," International Journal of Middle East Studies 25,4 [1993]: 587-605, and Norman Calder, Studies in Muslim Jurisprudence [Oxford Univ. Press, 1993]). The book under review by Ahmed El Shamsy, along with the monographs of Joseph E. Lowry (Brill, 2007), Mohyddin Yahia (Brepols, 2009), and David R. Vishanoff (American Oriental Society, 2011), as well as a number of articles by Lowry and El Shamsy himself, have established that al-Shafii's works can be reliably attributed to him, that they were of early date, and that they exerted influence soon after he wrote them rather than after a long hiatus. The present work makes all of these arguments, in greater detail than available heretofore, within a larger, overarching argument. Al-Shafi'i proposed a radically new system of legal hermeneutics that successfully resolved a number of debates that were current in his day, limiting the canon of sacred sources of the law to the Quran and the extant body of hadith. This model barred customary practice from determining Islamic law, overthrowing the old, communitarian model championed by the Malikis, and in the course of the next century and a half it went on to become nearly universally accepted among Sunni jurists. It owed its success in part to the political support of the Tulunid dynasty in Egypt and to resistance to the imperial policies of the 'Abbasids. The Canonization of Islamic Law thus squarely focuses on the writings and legacy of al-Shafi'i, something that is not immediately evident from the book's title or from its chapter titles (chapter eight, an exception, mentions "the Shafi'i school"). This work, like that of Joseph Schacht and Vishanoff's recent monograph, assigns al-Shafi'i a pivotal and innovative role in the establishment of what became defining features of Islamic orthodoxy: the standard modes of hermeneutics of the sacred sources in the Sunni legal tradition.

The term "canonization" is used here in a distinct and unusual sense, as shorthand for the restriction of the textual sources for Islamic legal interpretation to the Quran and the hadith corpus. El Shamsy explains that he treats neither the canonization of the Quranic text nor that of Sunni hadith, but he does not address other meanings that might at first be conjured up by the phrase "the canonization of Islamic law," viz., the establishment of particular Islamic legal rulings, such as the prohibition of interest in commercial transactions, or the fixing of the conventions of Islamic lawbooks, such as the division of the law into standard chapters following the set order of ritual...