Das "K. al-Wadiha" des Abd al-Malik b. Habib: Edition und Kommentar zu Ms. Qarawiyyin 809/40 (Abwab al-Tahara).

• Author: Brockopp, Jonathan E.

Most Islamicists would probably categorize Ossendorf-Conrad's new book as a typical contribution by a German orientalist - a narrowly defined project of interest to a mere handful of scholars. Indeed, Ossendorf-Conrad does nothing to change that impression, constantly reminding the reader that the state of scholarship on early Maliki sources is "angesprochen unbefriedigend" (p. 5), that assessment of the importance of the author can only be made within "sehr enge Grenzen" (p. 30), and that reconstruction of Ibn Habib's dependence on Malik's ra y is "kaum moglich" (p. 107). While this negative stance serves the author well when it comes to her critical text edition, it also prevents her from making any connection between her work and the broader world of Islamic studies. As a result, one might miss the fact that this book is a vital contribution to Islamic legal and social history.

There is no doubt that Ossendorf-Conrad is right - the state of scholarship on the early Maliki school is deeply unsatisfactory. Most surveys of the field are limited to brief treatments of the Muwatta of Malik b. Anas (d. 179/795) and the Mudawwanah of Sahnun b. Sa id (d. 240/854), ignoring texts that remain in manuscript form. Worse yet, neither of these two fundamental texts has ever undergone a critical edition. The vulgate recension of the Muwatta by Yahya b. Yahya (d. 234/848), the most widely used of the various recensions and the focus of numerous commentaries, is based on late manuscripts and does not make reference to older manuscripts that have been recently discovered. Perhaps more important, little attempt has been made to reconcile the differences between Yahya b. Yahya's recension and the other Muwatta recensions, seven of which have been published, while at least one more remains in manuscript form.(1) While there is no comparable problem with differing recensions of the Mudawwanah, a critical edition is still lacking, and the currently published editions do not take ancient manuscripts into account. Therefore, most of the secondary studies on early Maliki law are based on rather shaky primary sources. This state of affairs is lamentable, since examination of manuscript and recently published sources could lead to new theories on such important issues as the relationship of hadith to ra y, the process of commentary development, and the location of legal authority in this early period. What currently prevents us from clarifying these and other issues is not the proliferation of school texts and pseudepigrapha (pace Calder), but rather a dearth of the kind of careful, patient scholarship exemplified by Ossendorf-Conrad.

The only way to correct this source situation is to edit these manuscripts and present them to a wider range of scholars, allowing students of Islamic law and social history to reread early Maliki jurisprudence. As a contribution to this project, Ossendorf-Conrad's book presents an edition of and commentary on MS Qarawiyyin 809/40, which is a twenty-four-folio fragment from the Kitab al-Wadihah of Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik b. Habib al-Sulami (d. 238/852). Her two-hundred-sixty-four-page commentary is a line-by-line analysis of the text, which includes an impressive list of parallels gleaned from examination of thirty-six texts of early Islamic jurisprudence, some still in manuscript form. A critical biography and analysis of the history of both the larger text and this manuscript fragment complete the book; a facsimile of MS Qarawiyyin 809/40 and a name index are also included.

From the outset, the book assumes a detailed knowledge of the current state of scholarship in Maliki jurisprudence, beginning (p. 1) by referring to the important, yet almost unknown, collection of early legal manuscripts in Kairouan, Tunisia. Since knowledge of this collection is essential to understanding the importance of Ossendorf-Conrad's book, I will include here a brief review of the Maliki manuscripts that have been identified in the thirty years since Sezgin completed the first volume of Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), for while MS Qarawiyyin 809 is listed in GAS, 1: 362, many of the other manuscripts used by Ossendorf-Conrad are not.

In two articles, Joseph Schacht drew the attention of the scholarly community to important collections of Maliki manuscripts in Fez, Kairouan, and Tunis (Schacht 1962 and 1967).(2) Since that time, other scholars, in particular Miklos Muranyi, have published a series of articles and books probing the riches of these collections. The Kairouan collection is of particular importance. Virtually uncatalogued, except for a handlist maintained by the director of manuscripts, Murad Ramah, this collection contains some of the oldest legal manuscripts in existence, including fragments dating to the mid- and early third Islamic century. These libraries contain some texts that antedate Malik's Muwatta and others that stem from some of Malik's more important contemporaries. Already, the thoughts of al-Awza i (GAS, 1: 516-17, d. 157/774), al-Majisun (d. 164/780-81), and Abd Allah b. Lahi ah (GAS, 1: 94, d. 174/790) have come to light.

Al-Awza i's thought is preserved in the recently published Kitab al-Siyar of al-Fazari (GAS, 1: 292, d. 186/802), in which al-Fazari quotes extensively from al-Awza i on the subject of war and international relations.(3) A previously unknown fragment of al-Majisun's Kitab al-Hajj has been uncovered and was published by Muranyi in 1985 (Muranyi 1985a); since then, several more folios have come to light, including a Kitab al-Buyu and a Kitab al-Talaq (Muranyi 1987, 2: 312). Finally, a sahifah of Abd Allah b. Lahi ah has been recently edited with commentary by R. G. Khoury as Abdullah b. Lahi a (97-174/715-790): Juge et grand maitre de l'ecole egyptienne (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986). This is a collection of hadith, only some of which are of legal significance, but Abd Allah b. Lahi ah's importance as a qadi in Egypt makes the work invaluable for understanding the background of his contemporaries (such as Ibn Wahb, Ibn al-Qasim and Abd Allah b. Abd al-Hakam) and...