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Ahmed El Shamsy: The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. ix, 253 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. £55. ISBN 978 110704148 6.

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Ahmed El Shamsy: The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. ix, 253 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. £55. ISBN 978 110704148 6.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2015

Scott C. Lucas*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona (Tucson)
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Abstract

Type
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2016 

Ahmed El Shamsy's book, The Canonization of Islamic Law, is a successful effort to locate Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī's (d. 204/820) written corpus in both its intellectual and social contexts. Over the past several years, El Shamsy has made major contributions to the study of Islamic law by arguing persuasively for the authenticity of the Umm and Risāla of al-Shāfiʿī, and discovering the Mukhtaṣar of al-Shāfiʿī's senior disciple, Abū Yaʿqūb al-Buwayṭī (d. 231/846), which had long been assumed lost. This careful reading of the Umm has led El Shamsy to classify al-Shāfiʿī's project as the “canonization” not of specific texts, but rather the prophetic hadith, as one of two sacred sources for Islamic law. This canonization established textual sources for jurisprudence and, more significantly, endeavoured to delegitimize the existing normative authority of the regional legal traditions of Medina and Iraq. It “embodied a radical individualism” of jurists engaging with texts, who rapidly became “a community of interpretation that defined itself in terms of shared hermeneutic stances vis à vis the canon of sacred sources” (p. 6) or, in other words, a madhhab.

While the claim that al-Shāfiʿī argued for the elevation of prophetic hadith to the status of revelation is widely agreed upon among Islamicists, El Shamsy's book breaks new ground by classifying this project as one of canonization, exploring the historical events in Egypt during the emergence of the Shāfiʿī school, examining carefully how al-Shāfiʿī's earliest students engaged with his writings in such a way as to establish the paradigm of the madhhab, and tracing the influence of al-Shāfiʿī's legal theory on scholars over the century after it was written. El Shamsy devotes two chapters (4 and 5) to the frequently ignored social history of Egypt during the third/ninth century, when the local Arab Mālikī aristocracy was threatened by the social mobility of local freed clients and ʿAbbāsid ambitions for centralization under Ḥanafī judges. He argues that the zealous executor of the inquisition (miḥna) in Egypt, Ibn Abī al-Layth (judge from 205–237/820–851), was primarily interested in promoting Ḥanafī judges at the expense of Mālikī and Shāfiʿī scholars, which explains his targetting of al-Buwayṭī, who died imprisoned in Baghdad in 231/846. The survival and success of the Shāfiʿī school, in El Shamsy's account, has much to do with the autonomous Ṭūlūnids, who supported the tolerant Ḥanafī judge Bakkār b. Qutayba (judge from 860–884), honoured Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān (d. 270/884), who was the primary transmitter of al-Shāfiʿī's written corpus, and even appointed the first Shāfiʿī judge in Egypt.

El Shamsy's identification of third/ninth and early fourth/tenth-century scholars who engaged with al-Shāfiʿī's legal theory is an important corrective to Wael Hallaq's claim, in his 1993 IJMES article, “Was al-Shafi‘i the master architect of Islamic jurisprudence?”, that the Risāla was “thoroughly ignored” (p. 590) during the third/ninth century. (Curiously, this article is nowhere cited in El Shamsy's book.) Of particular importance is his demonstration of its impact on the methodological introductions of the Quran commentaries of Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938) and al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), as well as the discovery of a fragment of a Mālikī refutation of al-Shāfiʿī that al-Rabīʿ included in his transmission of the Umm (p. 209).

As can be gleaned from the title of his book, El Shamsy seeks to argue that al-Shāfiʿī did not merely found the madhhab bearing his name, but actually provided the theoretical underpinnings for all Islamic jurisprudence by “initiating the process of canonization” and developing “the first explicit theorization of revelation as divine communication encapsulated in the textual form of the Quran and its auxiliary, prophetic Hadith” (p. 5). The second step of this process was the acceptance of this theory by other Sunni jurists. El Shamsy restates this thesis somewhat more tenuously in his conclusion, where he describes the canonization process as “an attempt to extricate tradition from revelation, to delegitimize the former as the primary mediator of the revealed message and to extricate the latter as a fixed, clearly demarcated category” (p. 223).

There are a couple of issues El Shamsy does not address that complicate his broader arguments. First, even if al-Shāfiʿī did canonize or elevate prophetic Hadith to the status of revealed source, there is a limited pool of Hadiths that are of use to a jurist. (For example, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī only includes 1,235 legal Hadiths in his popular collection, Bulūgh al-marām.) The stubborn fact remains that the overwhelming majority of rulings in Islamic law are not based on the revealed sources, which means “tradition” and personal opinions have always been of tremendous significance. Second, it is unclear how much of an impact al-Shāfiʿī's elevation of Hadith had on the actual positions of the Mālikī and Ḥanafī schools of law, which, to this day, valorize the Muwaṭṭaʿ of Mālik and Mudawwana of Saḥnūn among the former, and thousands of opinions ascribed to Abū Ḥanīfa, Abū Yūsuf, and al-Shaybanī preserved in a host of books, among the latter. Had al-Shāfiʿī had a truly “transformative” (p. 220) impact on these two schools, we would not have expected Ibn Ḥazm's (d. 456/1064) sustained critique, throughout his Muḥallā, of all four Sunni madhāhib's deviations from the clear teachings of the canonical Hadith collections. Indeed, it may be that the Ẓāhirīs were the most faithful jurists to al-Shāfiʿī's canonization project, since they alone insisted upon grounding all Islamic law on the twin revealed sources of Islam.

These criticisms of El Shamsy's assessment of the significance of Hadith in Muslim jurisprudence in no way detract from the high quality of The Canonization of Islamic Law. It is very well-written, draws on an impressive array of Arabic texts, and is the best available guide to al-Shafiʿi's legal-theoretical writings, in large part because it engages the arguments expressed in both the Risāla and the Umm. In short, it is essential reading for all students and scholars of Islamic law.