The Logic of Law Making in Islam is a book of great scholarly value that rests on deceptively modest claims. The stated purpose of Sadeghi's study is to provide readers with a “general model of juristic decision making” that might be applied to any legal tradition, but that takes post-formative Hanafi jurisprudence on women and prayer as its case study (xi). Drawing on the opinions of Hanafi jurists writing between the eighth and eighteenth centuries, Sadeghi proves that an enduring relationship between stable laws and flexible legal reasoning was responsible for the dynamic, if conservative, quality of Hanafi jurisprudence throughout the pre-modern period.

Sadeghi's focused approach and use of a single legal problem as a case study bolster, rather than detract from, the book's potential to reshape a number of well-established scholarly conventions and conversations. The first argument Sadeghi makes, for example, is that the standard academic model of legal decision making must be inverted. Jurists, Sadeghi demonstrates, have not historically drawn on textual sources (here, the Qurʾan and hadith) in order to derive law, but rather they have started with a given law and then interpreted “sources” in order to reconcile these texts with the law (xii). Moreover, Sadeghi continues, this method of interpretation is by no means a cynical manipulation of the texts on the part of jurists. On the contrary, it demonstrates more effectively than conventional accounts of legal reasoning both the intelligence and the good faith of jurists who recognize that interpretation is always a complex and far from linear process (122, 135, 148–149). Pushing the related work of Sherman Jackson to a logical conclusion, Sadeghi shows that this inverted model of legal reasoning can also apply to legal practice (35–36).

Much of the book is devoted to demonstrating—empirically as well as theoretically—that Hanafi (and other) jurists have worked in this way. A corollary to this point, though, provides Sadeghi an intriguing entry into a second debate in the field of Islamic legal studies: the question of whether Islamic jurisprudence is dynamic or static. A major theme of Sadeghi's book is that the key force driving jurisprudence in general is “legal inertia.” The primary rationale for any law's existence, in any tradition, Sadeghi claims, is nothing more than its prior existence. Barring some extreme contradiction between a pre-existing law and a given social or ethical consideration, this pre-existing law will persist, even when the values or historical circumstances that gave rise to it have long since disappeared (55).

The book's fascinating discussion of Hanafi jurisprudence on women and prayer (which includes chapter 3 on the legality of women praying alongside men, chapter 4 on women leading prayers, and chapter 5 on women participating in communal prayers) provides Sadeghi with a series of excellent case studies to test this claim. “While the adjacency law [on women praying next to men] endured” in Hanafi jurisprudence, for example, Sadeghi shows that “the reasons given for it were variable and fluid, and they postdated the law. Moreover, when a reason was disqualified . . . this did not bring about the collapse of the law that ostensibly rested on it; rather, new reasons were devised” (74). Indeed, as Sadeghi comments, the fact that what are ordinarily described as legal outcomes remained stable, even in the face of radical changes to the textual canon over the centuries, was “a tribute to the hermeneutic flexibility of [jurists’] methodology” (137). Rather than insisting on either the dynamism (via ijtihād) of Islamic jurisprudence or its lack thereof—rather than accepting a dichotomy between change as vitality, on the one hand, and inertia as repetition, on the other—Sadeghi shows that inertia, or the lack of change, is itself evidence of vitality. Post-formative Hanafi jurisprudence was vibrant because the laws remained stable.

This sort of compelling and radical break from conventional scholarly analysis, embedded in rigorous textual analysis, characterizes Sadeghi's reconfiguration of a number of conversations in history and gender studies as well. Indeed, the book poses, via quiet and focused argumentation, a series of undeniable challenges to a collection of assumptions underlying Islamic studies writ large (challenges that continue into the appendix's virtuoso defense of the authenticity of the Kitāb al-Āthār). The book is a pleasure to read—a study with the elegance, rigor, and (deceptive) simplicity of the best sort of mathematical proof.