The Dialectical Forge: Juridical Disputation and the Evolution of Islamic Law.

• Author: Shamsy, Ahmed El

The Dialectical Forge: Juridical Disputation and the Evolution of Islamic Law. By WALTER EDWARD YOUNG. Logic, Argumentation and Reasoning, vol. 9. Cham, Switzerland: SPRINGER. 2017. Pp. xiv + 643. $149.99, [euro]124.79 (cloth); $109, [euro]101.14 (ebook).

Some people disagreed with me on this point, so I debated them, and they put forward some of the arguments that I mentioned in the discussion on this point of law. I paraphrased [their position], and they answered me with what I have summarized here; however, 1 am not sure whether I might have clarified my own position when writing it down beyond what I actually uttered when I was speaking. I do not like to report anything other than what I actually said, even when I am only paraphrasing what 1 said.

Thus starts one of the countless debate transcripts and summaries that al-ShafTT (d. 204/820) preserved for posterity in his magnum opus al-Umm (ed. R. F. (c) Abd al-Muttalib [Mansoura: Dar al-Wafa', 2001], 2: 648). These debates are a goldmine for historians of Islamic law because they offer a window into contestations among legal scholars--the back-and-forth of jurists challenging each other's reasoning, methodology, and sources. In these debates we catch glimpses of what was at stake for the jurists beyond the individual legal rules so neatly compiled in their handbooks of law.

Until the publication of the book under review, the most extensive study of the formal field of dialectics in Islamic thought was Larry Miller's unpublished, though often cited, 1984 Princeton dissertation, "Islamic Disputation Theory: A Study of the Development of Dialectic in Islam from the Tenth through Fourteenth Centuries." Miller argued that Islamic dialectics as a formal set of rules for arguing and resolving disputes originated in the ninth-century reception of Aristotelian dialectics in kaldm theology; it was then adopted into law and transmuted into the legal genre of disputation (Him al-jadal) in the tenth century. I subsequently observed (The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013], 22-26) that already before the ninth century, the legal debates that al-Shafi (c) T preserves demonstrate adherence to certain dialectical rules of engagement accepted by both parties. Further, within the type of reasoning that eighth-century jurists called ra'y, such exchanges were so prevalent that ra'y can usefully be translated as "dialectical jurisprudence."

...