The Economy of Certainty

The publication of Aron Zysow’s 1984 dissertation, ‘The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory’, in the book form with the same title, is an event in the field of Islamic legal studies. It has been long overdue. The book form is mostly a faithful reproduction of the dissertation, but introduces a few bidaʿ ḥasana, that is, praiseworthy innovations, such as turning the useful but painful to access endnotes into footnotes, a more manageable pagination, and Zysow’s brief addenda recapitulating recent research after every chapter. Reviews are meant to introduce, critique, praise, or, if nothing else, summarize the arguments of the scholarship being reviewed; none of these is an easy task with respect to the book at hand. A work that has attained an iconic status in the field in its dissertation form, and available in one form or another to most graduate students and scholars, hardly needs an introduction. Its sheer erudition, whose complexity perfectly reflects the field it introduces, teeming with a tightly-knit account of the fascinating riddles of Islamic legal theory, rich but never far from its central thesis, and suggestive of ideas worthy of new research projects every few pages down, defies any attempt to summarize. If one must insist on recapitulating its thesis in a few words, one can hardly do better than its title, ‘the economy of certainty’; rarely is the substance of a study so completely and aptly summed up in its title. Nor is critique of it an easy matter, or even perhaps called for; to a work that has unassumingly defined a field for nearly three decades and encouraged many more researches, without having exhausted its potential, a list of quibbles is hardly a worthy response. Finally, there is no lack of glowing tributes to it, which is both an apt introduction to a dazzling field, and a pioneering work in its own right. I restrict myself, therefore, to pointing out a few selected themes that permeate it

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