Content area
Full text
Harald Motzki is the most prominent contemporary scholar of early Islamic jurisprudence and hadith studies, and this translation of his seminal work Die Anfänge der islamischen Jurisprudenz: Ihre Entwicklung in Mekka bis zur Mitte des 2./8. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1991) will make his revision of the Schachtian model much more accessible. In 1950, Joseph Schacht opened a 150-year gap between the lifetime of Muhammad and the first authentic legal texts of the nascent schools of the 8th and 9th centuries by questioning the authenticity of the hadiths contained in those legal texts. Schacht concluded that isnad s, which claimed to provide transmission histories during the first 100 years of Islam, were fabricated and arbitrary. It is this conclusion that Motzki seeks to overturn.
In his first chapter, Motzki provides an excellent survey of development of skepticism towards hadiths starting with Sachau, von Kremer, and Goldziher. His focus, however, is on Schacht. He attempts to demonstrate that Schacht relied on questionable assumptions and methods, which made his main conclusions untenable. In particular, Schacht's "e silentio procedure" proves problematic, since the recorded hadiths do not represent all the extant hadiths at the time (pp. 21-22). Motzki provides an example later in the book to demonstrate that authorities did not necessarily cite all of the relevant hadiths that they knew.
The second chapter analyzes the Musannaf of
[Image omitted. See Article Image.]
Abd al-Razzaq al-San
[Image omitted. See Article Image.]
ani...