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Islamic Law: From Historical Foundations To Contemporary Practice |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Islamic History > Item 322
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Islamic Law: From Historical Foundations To Contemporary Practice
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by Mawil Izzi Dien
Sales Rank: 1465548
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List Price: $18.00
$18.00
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on 6-18-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 178 pages
Published by: University of Notre Dame Press February 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0268031746
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0268031749
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.2 x 0.4 inches
Weighs: 10.4 ounces
Book Description
This survey of Islamic law combines Western and Islamic views and describes the relationship between the original theories of Islamic law and the views of contemporary Islamic writers. Covering the key topics in the area, including the history, sources and formation of Islamic law, the legal mechanisms, and the contemporary context, it is strong in its coverage of the modern perspective, which distinguishes this book from other texts in the field. The aim is to provide the student with a basic understanding of Islamic law and access to the complexity of the Islamic legal system. The language used is non-technical and understanding is aided with a supplementary detailed glossary and analytical indices.
About The Author
Mawil Izzi Dien is a senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter.
Reader Reviews
(Disclaimer) This review is based upon an incomplete manuscript submitted by the University of Edinburgh Press to the American University in Cairo Press for consideration as a co-publication; they had apparently already signed the contract with the author. I reviewed the manuscript for the AUC press. Parts of my review were submitted to the U of Eburgh Press for consideration of the author, who may have rewritten as a result. I am disappointed that Edinburgh Press persisted in its agreement to publish. While the author claims that this work is "an academic introduction to the subject" of Islamic law, it is not clear what he means by that. For, immediately upon making that pronouncement, he goes on to assure readers that "the use of Arabic terms and jargon has been minimized". This is a curious approach to an academic work, and the curiosity does not stop there. Far from being a scholarly introduction to the subject, it appears to be an entirely cursory explanation of it-and not a well written one at that. It comprises a concatenation of clumsy constructions and glaring gaps. From the very beginning, the work is plagued by bad writing and uncongealed thinking. In explaining his approach, for example, the author straight away says this: "There is no point in trying to study Islamic law with preconceived ideas of Islamic love or non-Islamic hate since this can lead to false conclusions. The point represents the second point of difficulty in understanding Islamic law. Muslims see it as the word of God and therefore Divine (sic) and beyond question...Western scholarship views it as "fabricated" or at its best a human "phenomenon" that needs to be studied. There is no doubt that each methodology has its own strengths and prejudices, whether historical or methodical (sic)." Aside from the careless conflation of points of view with methodologies, the confusing of methodological and methodical, and the inept point about points representing points, there is the question of ill-conceived terms. What can possibly be meant by "Islamic love" and "non-Islamic hate"? Are these to be understood as Islamophilia and Islamophobia? Probably. If that is the case-and we rather hope it is, the alternatives being too awful to contemplate-it seems something of an irrelevant issue, even though the author goes on to claim that his "volume...aims to examine Islamic law from both a Western and Islamic perspective". This being a work in English, it is obliged conform to some of the conventions of detached expository writing. Either that, or it will end by appearing as one of those painfully awkward tracts composed by a woefully ill-equipped apologist propounding the tenets of Islam to a sceptical audience. This work is not quite that, but then again it is not quite the other. Among its many faults is that for an introduction it assumes a great deal of background knowledge. By page two of the foreword, without warning readers are unwittingly plunged into controversy when the author attempts to define his own methodology (or is it a perspective?): "[T]his book suggests a contrasting viewpoint from that of some classical Muslim academics [scholars woud be a better term to use, since "academics" suggests the modern academy], whose perception of the term `sources of legislation' is confined to the Quran, Sunna, consensus and in some cases public interest". Novices may be forgiven for not quite catching the point. By now, informed readers will surely know what the Quran is. But can they be expected to grasp the meaning of the transliterated technical Arabic term Sunna or to recognize the implications of the principles of consensus (ijmaa3) or considerations of broad public interest (maslaha) as implements of establishing legal precedent? Are they also to recognize the specific conception of and historical antecedents to the notion of `sources of legislation' (usul al-fiqh)? I think not. And yet, here is the author dropping them (the concepts themselves, not the actual terms ) onto a readership, which, by his own assumption, is new to the subject. He then commits a logical error, not the first and certainly not the last, by asserting that all other sources were seen by those scholars simply as mechanisms devised to interpret the law. Well, he just got through saying that these scholars recognize only four sources of law (and while they, especially the latter two, are enormously broad, he nevertheless sees them as confining). Aside from that, he apparently fails to recognize that even the processes of gaining a consensus and of considering the public interest must also be based in interpretation, as indeed must the very formulation of legal tenets derived from a reading of the Quran or the traditions of the Prophet. Herein lies another fundamental flaw of the work: the author himself is afflicted by those blinders of faith that he rather maladroitly chides others for wearing. One of those surely is his tacit acquiescence in the popular conceptualisation of Islamic law as some monolithic, immutable dictum rather than a series of opinions and interpretations produced by human beings attempting to grapple with holy writ. He is, apparently, incapable of divesting himself of his fondly-held pious traditions long enough to provide a clear-eyed, unbiased treatment of his complex subject. Such things are very much needed now of all times. Regardless of that, the author appears not to favour such an approach either. The result is an unappealing amalgam of pious maxims and a stab or two at objectivity. This is more like a poorly executed undergraduate survey than a serious treatise by a specialist.
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