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The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. By Ahmed El SHAMSY. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 253. $90.
Recent years have witnessed several important scholarly contributions devoted to the thought and legacy of the prominent jurist and legal theorist Muhammmad b. Idris al-ShâficI (d. 204/820), reacting to studies that questioned the early date and influence of his works (particularly Wael Hallaq, "Was al-Shâti'ï the Master-Architect of Islamic Jurisprudence," International Journal of Middle East Studies 25,4 [1993]: 587-605, and Norman Calder, Studies in Muslim Jurisprudence [Oxford Univ. Press, 1993]). The book under review by Ahmed El Shamsy, along with the monographs of Joseph E. Lowry (Brill, 2007), Mohyddin Yahia (Brepols, 2009), and David R. Vishanoff (American Oriental Society, 2011), as well as a number of articles by Lowry and El Shamsy himself, have established that al-Shâficï's works can be reliably attributed to him, that they were of early date, and that they exerted influence soon after he wrote them rather than after a long hiatus. The present work makes all of these arguments, in greater detail than available heretofore, within a larger, overarching argument. Al-Shafifi proposed a radically new system of legal hermeneutics that successfully resolved a number of debates that were current in his day, limiting the canon of sacred sources of the law to the Quran and the extant body of hadith. This model barred customary practice from determining Islamic law, overthrowing the old, communitarian model championed by the Mälikls, and in the course of the next century and a half it went on to become nearly universally accepted among Sunni jurists. It owed its success in part to the political support of the Tülünid dynasty in Egypt and to resistance to the imperial policies of the cAbbäsids. The Canonization of Islamic Law thus squarely focuses on the writings and legacy of al-ShaficI, something that is not immediately evident from the book's title or from its chapter titles (chapter eight, an exception, mentions "the Shâficï school"). This work, like that of Joseph Schacht and Vishanoff's recent monograph, assigns al-Shâfici a pivotal and innovative role in the establishment of what became defining features of Islamic orthodoxy: the standard modes of hermeneutics of the sacred sources in the Sunni...