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The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law. By David Vishanoff. American Oriental Series, vol. 93. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2011. Pp. xxi + 318. $46.
According to the second/eighth-century historian Muhammad Abu Mikhnaf (d. 157/773-4), the fourth caliph cAlï b. Abi Tälib (d. 40/661) once said, "The Quran is recorded script, bound between two covers, and it does not speak. It is only men who give voice to it" (al-Tabari, Tärikh, ed. Muhammad Abu 1-Fadl Ibrahim, Dâr al-Macârif, 1970, 5: 66). The occasion for this statement is said to have been 'All's confrontation with the Khärijis, who anathemized him after he agreed to resort to mediation in his conflict with Mu'âwiya. For the Khärijis, mediation contravened the Quranic verses that reserve the authority of decision-making for God alone (6:57, 12:40, 12:67), and 'All's sin of submitting to human judgment thus placed him outside the community.
In his new book David Vishanoff shows that the debate regarding the extent to which revelation speaks for itself rather than through its interpreters blossomed into a sophisticated investigation of the nature of language, communication, and interpretation, particularly in the discipline of legal theory (usiil al-fiqh). Nearly three decades ago Aron Zysow pointed to the enormous and uncharted intellectual riches contained in the literature of Islamic legal theory ("The Economy of Certainty," Ph.D. diss., Harvard, 1984). Nevertheless, comprehensive historical accounts of its constitutive fields remain to be written. Vishanoff's book sets out to write such a history of the emergence and development of legal hermeneutic thought. His close reading of hermeneutical debates spanning more than three centuries reveals the remarkable diversity and conceptual detail of this discourse and successfully breaks down and analyzes a number of central questions within it.
The book begins with a brief survey of the earliest evidence of hermeneutic thought before turning to its principal subject matter: the hermeneutic theories of influential Muslim jurists in the second/eighth to fifth/eleventh centuries who decisively shaped the trajectory of the discipline of legal theory as well as of Islamic law as a whole. Vishanoff locates the "birth" of legal hermeneutics in the work of al-Shäfi'I (d. 204/820), who formulated the first coherent hermeneutic theory. From al-Shäfi'i Vishanoff moves to the ideas of...