More Medieval Legal Theory: Taqlid (Precedent) and the Madhhab (School of Law)
Questions for Seminar:
- Did taqlid make Islamic law stagnant?
- How did the madhhabs organize Islamic legal thought and education?
Assigned Reading:
Zubaida, chapter 1.
Mohammed Fadel, “The Social Logic of Taqlīd and the Rise of the Mukhtaṣar,” Islamic Law and Society 3 (1996), 194-233.
Sherman Jackson, “Kramer versus Kramer in a Tenth / Sixteenth-Century Egyptian Court: Post-Formative Jurisprudence between Exigency and Law,” Islamic Law and Society 8 (2001), 27-51.
Sherman Jackson, “Kramer versus Kramer in a Tenth / Sixteenth-Century Egyptian Court: Post-Formative Jurisprudence between Exigency and Law,” Islamic Law and Society 8 (2001), 27-51.
Primary Source:
Al-Nawawī on the ranks of muftis, in Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature, ed. Norman Calder et al. (Routledge, 2013), 261-5.
Further Reading:
Oussama Arabi, David Powers and Susan Spectorsky (eds.), Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists (Brill, 2013).
Norman Calder, "Al-Nawawi's Typology of Muftis and its Significance for a General Theory of Islamic Law," Islamic Law and Society 3 (1996), 137-64.
Wael Hallaq, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" International Journal of Middle East Studies 16 (1984), 3-41.
Wael Hallaq, Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Yossef Rapoport, "Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlīd: The Four Chief Qāḍīs under the Mamluks," Islamic Law and Society 10 (2003), 210-28.
Ahmed el-Shamsy, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2013).