Jonathan e brockopp biography of rory gilmore

“Competing Theories of Authority in early Mālikī Texts” 2001

Studies in Islamic Legal Theory, ed. Bernard Weiss. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 3-22., 2001

In the classical period of Islamic law the science of usul al-fiqh fulfilled many different funct... more In the classical period of Islamic law the science of usul al-fiqh fulfilled many different functions, among them the desires of an intellectual elite to create a perfect, theologically sound system for explaining the genesis of law. In the formative period, however, the theoretical concerns of the jurists were restricted to more pragmatic issues of authority and teaching. Their solutions to these problems were not yet expressed in treatises on usul al-fiqh and that science did not yet exist as a separate branch of intellectual endeavor. It is possible, however, to discover something of their thought on these matters, both in isolated statements and in the patterns by which they organized their legal works. Malik's Muwatta', for example, is not a book of usul, but I believe we can learn about Malik's ideas of theory of law by studying the Muwatta' and similar texts from the second and third Islamic centuries. 2 After briefly surveying the methods which some other scholars have used to identify patterns of authority within early legal texts, I will demonstrate that analysis of early Maliki literature presents some While this paper focusses on the early period, the connection between works of usul and works of furu c in the classical period is also disputed and often simply absent. Clearly even the establishment of a fully recognized science of legal reasoning , and of large areas of agreement among scholars from different schools of law did not result in works being organized along the lines of classical usul theory (see, for instance, Muhammad Fadel's paper in this volume). Yet this only begs the question of what operating principles function within these texts offuru'; classifying and identifying these principles will allow us to separate these works more carefully into genres of writing, and to understand something of the differing claims to authority operating among the jurists as well as the function of these furu c texts in society and teaching institutions. <i>Studies in Islamic legal theory</i>, edited by B. Weiss, BRILL, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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