What are the “principles” of Islamic law? This question has been a preoccupying interest of researchers in Islamic law. Most have searched for the answer in the genre entitled “principles of jurisprudence”, or uṣūl al-fiqh. However, these principles only help us understand the derivation of law, and even then, their role is subject to intense debate. Wolfhart Heinrichs and Intisar Rabb, among others, have directed our attention to the importance of “juristic principles”, or al-qawā‘id al-fiqhīyah, as principles that govern cases of substantive law. In recent years, there has been an interest in the “higher objectives” of Islamic law, or maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah, as a further layer of meta-principles explored for the purposes of ethically reforming the law. These studies have all furthered our understandings of how the law was to be conceived, but the question of how a jurist in training was to incorporate these layers of meanings is still not clear. A new avenue of research consists in analysing the use of dialectical reasoning in substantive legal commentaries. Walter Young has recently applied dialectical theory, or ‘ilm al-jadal, to an early work of jurisprudence to show the early use of advanced dialectical techniques to analyse and “create” the law. Thus far, there have been no sustained dialectical analyses of legal commentaries from the classical era of the madhhabs, or schools of law. This paper presents the findings of such a study, applying this analysis to the renowned legal commentary of ‘Alī b. Abī Bakr al-Marghīnānī, the Hidāyah. The paper demonstrates the role of dialectic in this legal commentary to present a colorful tapestry of uṣūl al-fiqh, al-qawā‘id al-fiqhīyah and maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah. It further uncovers an additional layer of meta-principles, the principles of fatwā, that govern the actual application of law to a particular social context. In so doing, this paper provides greater insight into what purpose curricular works of law were actually to serve in the early classical Ḥanafī school. Rather than merely supporting a largely static statement of law, as is commonly perceived, I argue that the true purpose of such works is to train the jurist in legal reasoning, whereby each case of the law serves as a window onto the multi-layered philosophy of law that upholds the individual case. The paper is a unique contribution to our understanding of classical juristic literature, juristic training and the interrelation of the many “principles” of the law.

George Makdisi has noted that disputations (munāzarāt) were the Medieval Islamic legal schools’ method of reasoning on the law. This paper interrogates the telos or ends that the Baghdad juristic disputation sought to achieve in the period succeeding what Christopher Melchert identified as the formation of the legal schools in the 10th century under the leadership of the Shāfi‘ī Ibn Surayj (d.306/918CE) and the Ḥanafī al-Karkhī (d.370/951CE). It takes issue with Wael Hallaq and Makdisi’s claims that the disputation was a means to resolve matters of legal difference (khilāf) and determine the truth of God’s law. I contend instead that jurists’ themselves debated over the purpose of their practice. By turning away from jadal manuals and focusing instead on early uṣūl al-fiqh texts, the paper locates a rich site of disagreement among jurists about the function of their disputations. On one side of this disagreement, the Ḥanafīs and Ash‘arīs clung to the slogan that “Every jurisconsult is correct”, affirming the correctness of all legal opinions. On the other side, many Shāfi‘īs claimed that the position of juristic infallibility undercut the raison d’être of disputations. Thus, they argued that there was only one right answer and that the disputation was the means to discover it. The Ḥanafīs and Ash‘arīs legitimated their engagement in disputations by contending that its dialogical argumentation helped a jurist better weigh the evidence for different though equally valid positions. I then suggest that the reason for the scholarly failure to recognize these debates is the product of insufficiently distinguishing juristic from theological disputations. Historians have seen both as the product of the translation of Aristotle’s writings on dialectic (jadal). Debates on juristic infallibility show a virtual consensus among jurists that there could only be one true answer in disputations on matters of theology (uṣūl al-diyānāt). This view stood in stark contrast to the richness of juristic disagreement over whether or not truth was singular in matters of the law. Hence, these jurists’ debates confirm Walter Young’s recent claims that the juristic disputation was shaped by its own history rather than the Greek translation movement. I employ these debates to demonstrate that historians ought to eschew attempts at locating a single telos to the disputation and suggest they should instead follow Nietzsche’s insight that the origin and existence of a practice is disconnected from its always historically contested meaning.

Bruce Hall and Chouki El Hamel have recently engaged with the topic of race in North-West Africa. As part of their discussions both authors make reference to the oft-used geographic term balad al-Sūdān (land of the blacks). In describing its meaning, both Hall and El Hamel begin with the riḥla (journey) of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. According to Hall, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa “brought with him a North African conception of racial difference that appears to have been unfamiliar to the people with whom he interacted” (Hall 34). Similarly, for El Hamel Ibn Baṭṭūṭa “made critical observations that sharply stigmatized what he considered pagan attitudes of black populations” (El Hamel 72). Yet, neither study, makes reference to the development and interpretation of balad al-sūdān in Mālikī fiqh (jurisprudence). In fact, El Hamel refuses to use the Islamic legal tradition since, in his mind, it presupposes a link between blackness and slavery. Though Hall and El Hamel are correct in their plea for a more nuanced understanding of race in Saḥaran and sub-Saharan Africa, their neglect of Mālikī legal texts represents a gap in their research methodologies. As Jocelyn Hendrickson has noted, a detailed analysis of legal documents - with context in mind - adds important dimensions to our understanding of culture and society. Therefore, this paper tracks the interpretation of balad al-sūdān through Mālikī legal texts, extracting cultural and social artifacts from their legal tradition. I follow the use of “balad al-sūdān” as it appears in commentaries on Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawānī’s Risāla. Al-Qayrawānī writes: “It is disapproved of to trade in the land of the enemy and the land of the blacks.” I thus track the juxtaposition of these two geographic terms (land of the enemy and land of the blacks) as a way to follow the cultural and social conceptions of balad al-sūdān in Mālikī fiqh. I will demonstrate that even though the term implies a racial category, the inflection found in the commentaries rarely recognizes a racial element. Instead, the geographic term fluctuates between indicating the ‘land of the enemy’ to an area governed by Muslims but still dangerous to the traveler. This focused analysis across a temporal range of Mālikī commentaries demonstrates how jurisprudential scholars continuously fought to buttress al-Qayrawānī’s original statement even when varying conceptions of culture and society altered the method of justification. Yet, these conceptions of culture and society never focused on race but rather changing religious norms.

The written Qur’an includes in its history a centuries-long period in which the scripture was assigned an exclusive script – a script to be used only for writing the Word of God. This Qur’anic script, called Kufic, has been approached by modern scholars primarily as a means of dating Qur’ans copied between the late eighth and tenth centuries. Beyond chronology, scholars have commented only on the defective nature of the script as a means of transmitting the Qur’anic text. The complete lack of diacritical marks, combined with the grouping of letters by connectivity rather than by words, have prompted scholars to assume that Qur’ans written in the Kufic script could not have been used except as an aide de memoire for people who had already memorized the entire scripture. This paper argues that the Kufic phase of Qur’an production was, in part, a response to an increased and more systematic use of the written scripture. Use of the Kufic script coincided with the development of the Qur’anic sciences of tafsir (Qur’an exegesis) and Islamic law. I have examined dozens of Qur’an manuscripts from this period, and by tracing the development of ornamentation in these codices, this paper demonstrates that as “unreadable” as the script may seem, the Qur’an during this period was read in increasingly complex ways. Qur’an manuscripts are uniformly un-paginated, and ornamentation in the text, I argue, was emplaced primarily as navigational aids for readers using the codices for multifaceted tasks such as the articulation of Islamic law. I demonstrate that the proliferation of ornamentation over time, such as division of the verses into groups of fives and tens, was necessary for the new uses to which the written Qur’an was put. Despite the traditional “ideal” of the primacy of orality, I demonstrate an increasing reliance on the use of the written Qur’an by medieval scholars. For instance, in his Muwatta, Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) repeatedly references the use of the written scripture during legal debates. References to the use of Qur’an codices in scholarly circles increased considerably a generation later as reflected in the Fada’il al-Qur’an by Abu Ubayd al-Qasim (d. 838). By tracing the development of Qur’an codices in the context of the growth of two religious sciences in the eighth and ninth centuries, this paper provides new insight into the twin disciplines of History of the Book and its sister field, the History of Reading.

This paper will address historical writing on conversion in the early Islamic era, and specifically the shift in religious identities and boundaries that occurred in seventh- and eighth-century Syria after the Muslim conquests. Instead of attempting to reconstruct sources that are not extant, this study traces the earliest and most local Syrian sources we do have, including chronicles, vitae of saints, sira and maghazi works, and martyrdom narratives. The extant record demonstrates transmission of some but not all such narratives into the present. Yet those extant still provide the modern reader with a robust array of styles, interpretive lenses, and depths of analysis and detail. These sources demonstrate a healthy variety in perspectives on conversion that no doubt also reflects the variety of perspectives maintained and documented in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries CE. If, as most studies of conversion suggest, Syrians did not convert in large numbers during the first hijri century, then it is interesting to identify a change in attitudes among Muslim leaders towards Christian Syrian populations during this same time period. What little we have from Syrian historians such as John Bar Penkaye, Theophanes and various anonymous chroniclers and biographers over these time periods, writing mainly in Arabic, Syriac and Greek, reflects the construction of an understanding of the Muslim community in relation to its coreligionists, comments on the frequency (or lack thereof) of conversion from one religion to another, and a sense of the implications of identifying oneself as a partisan of a particular faith and sect in early Islamic Syria.