On Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence

by Muhammad M. al-Azami

Overview

This in-depth study presents a detailed analysis and critique of the classic Western work on the origins of Islamic law, Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Azami's work examines the sources used by Schacht to develop his thesis on the relation of Islamic law to the Qur'an, and exposes fundamental flaws in Schacht's methodology that led to the conclusions unsupported by the texts examined. This book is an important contribution to Islamic legal studies from an Islamic perspective.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780946621460
Publisher:	Islamic Texts Society
Publication date:	06/01/1996
Series:	Islamic Religion Series
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

hadith. In 1980, he received the prestigious King Faisal Award for his research and presentations on the Sunnah.

Read an Excerpt

In the sixth century of the Common Era, the Ka'ba in Mecca, the symbolic heart of monotheism, was surrounded by and filled with no fewer than 360 idols. The city itself was full of idol worshippers. Polytheism was rife throughout the Arabian peninsula; the small Jewish communities dotted here and there and the few tribes that had been converted to Christianity were the exception. As Muir writes: "The foundation of Arab faith was deep-rooted idolatry, which for centuries had stood proof, with no palpable symptoms of decay, against every attempt at evangelisation from Egypt and Syria."
   Commercial life was flourishing, especially in Mecca and Ta'if, while Medina was a lively business and agricultural center. Usury was widespread. And with tribes as the social units, there was no organized government. There was, consequently, no agreed way of obtaining justice, let alone a system of legal practice. Disputes were settled either on a crude revenge basis or by calling in arbitrators acceptable to both sides. Although the Arabs had some excellent qualities, such as courage, hospitality, honesty, and love of freedom, they also had some evil and degrading vices.
   It was into this environment that Allah sent Muhammad with his Eternal Message. His influence was immediate: during the period of more than a decade that he preached in Mecca he was subjected, in a way that Christian preachers and other thinkers before him in the same area had not been, to continual ridicule and harassment. The ruling polytheists saw only too clearly the threat posed to their way of life by the core sentence of Muhammad's message: "La Ilaha Illallah." "There is no god but Allah" was no dead metaphysical phrase but a living creed which demanded the total submission of man's will to the will of Allah and not to the will of other men. As Almighty Allah says:


Say: my prayer, my ritual sacrifice, my living, my dying all belong to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.


   If the principle of total submission of man's will to Allah is accepted, naturally and logically it leads to the belief that His Will ought to be the only law and that man must submit himself to these injunctions in their entirety.

Table of Contents

Key to Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One: Law and Islam
   Chapter 1: The Place of the Law in Islam
   Chapter 2: Islamic Law in the First Century A.H.
Part Two: The Sunna of the Prophet and Islamic Law
   Chapter 3: The Sunna: Its Meaning and Concept
   Chapter 4: The Living Tradition is More Authoritative than the Sunna of the Prophet
   Chapter 5: The Authority of the Sunna of the Prophet in the Ancient Schools of Law
   Chapter 6: The Sunna of the Prophet in Transition
   Chapter 7: On the Growth of Legal Tradition
   Chapter 8: The Isnad System: Its Validity and Authenticity
Appendix 1: The Use of Isnad in Sirah and Hadith-Fiqh Literature
Appendix 2: Materials of Appendix 1 in Arabic
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

'For the first time we have work like Azami's; he has devoted literally years of research to the investigation of hadith and has analysed, tested and passed scholarly judgement on Schacht's argument step by step, working with actual hadith materials. This book is indeed an effective response to Schacht... Azami has, through this and other works, demonstrated himself to be an outstanding scholar of hadith... he is the most well-versed and learned scholar of the Islamic science of tradition.'

From the Publisher

"This book is indeed an effective response to Schacht . . . [Azami] is the most well-versed and learned scholar of the Islamic science of tradition."

Journal of Near Eastern Studies