Lena Salaymeh. The Beginnings of Islamic Law

Lena Salaymeh’s The Beginnings of Islamic Law is a most welcome study of two distinct but interrelated issues. One is the state of the field of historical studies of Muslim jurisprudence in a general and synoptic way. The other comprises three substantive legal issues, both in themselves and by way of illustrating broader conceptual and historiographical issues: the treatment of prisoners of war, more specifically, the legitimacy of their execution; male circumcision; and wife-initiated divorce. The book is structured in three pairs of chapters, each pair starting with a discussion of concepts and historiographies, followed by a detailed study of legal discourses (rather than practices) as they developed from the earliest attested evidence of legal consequence during the lifetime of Muhammad up to the eleventh century and a little beyond. There is much valuable material in both the conceptual discussions and the historical sketches of jurisprudence. The author is quite right to argue against a number of misconceptions common in the study of Islam and of Muslim jurisprudence, both by international scholars and by Muslim traditionalists, medieval and modern. One could mention notions of “origin,” which is parsed as lineage and genealogy rather than in terms of proper historical arguments, and the use of “Islam” as an anthropomorphized entity, as a total and essentialist explanatory category, in effect as a grid of misrecognition. The author argues against reworking beginnings from the vantage point of outcomes.

Fiqh · Historiography · Islam · Jurisprudence · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Sharia · Sociology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships