Book Review

Professor Hallaq's book is welcome on two counts. Firstly, it is the only general introduction to usul al-fiqh, the theoretical discipline which supposedly underlies the substantive law of Islam, and secondly it draws together results of Professor Hallaq's own writing over the last fifteen years. The scope of the work is ambitious, providing a conspectus of the subject from the earliest days of the formation of the law, which Hallaq places in the days of the Prophet in the seventh century, until our own time. The last of the legal theories to be discussed is the ingenious, if eccentric, work of the Syrian engineer Shahrur, which appeared in 1992. The book thus enables the reader to follow the development of the genre from its earliest days, to the height of what might be termed its "classical perfection" between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, and to observe the struggle in the twentieth century to accommodate the traditional notion of a law whose sources are divinely inspired with the political, social, and consequent legal upheavals of the twentieth century	1
The scope of the book is therefore ambitious, especially as it is the first of its kind, and since the secondary literature on usul is not so copious as to allow the author simply to summarize the work of his predecessors. For much of his material he has to fall back on his own research on the primary sources. He succeeds, however, in preventing the material from overwhelming him by confining himself largely to the tradition in usul inspired by Ash'ari theology, a major strand in Islamic thinking which places severe limits on the epistemological role of human reason. He also bases the work on a relatively small number of representative theorists. Chapter 5 ("Social Reality and the Response of Theory"), in particular, is devoted to the work of a single jurist, Abu Ishaq-al-Shatibi (d. 1388). This method of commenting on what is representative or illuminating, rather than trying to cover the entire historical field, keeps the work coherent and within manageable limits. The clarity of the author's style matches the clarity of the book's outline. The subject matter does not in itself make for easy reading, but Professor Hallaq's own written style is clear and unpretentious and, most importantly, he has kept Islamic technical terminology to the irreducible minimum, greatly adding to the appeal of the book for the non-specialist and for the non-Arabist. Furthermore, in discussing, for example, the usul-ists' use of logic, he uses terms and procedures which will be familiar to modern logicians in order to describe the arguments of the Islamic theorists.	2
The book, in brief, is a major contribution within its own subject area and, since usul occupy an important place in Islamic intellectual history, within Islamic studies at large. However, since no review is complete without some carping, I would add some criticisms.	3
First, I felt that the beginning of Chapter 1 ("The Formative Period") is too fundamentalist in its account of pre-Islamic Arabia and the Prophet. I feel that the "skeptical" tradition of presenting the origins of Islam and Islamic law, represented especially by Goldziher, Schacht, Wansbrough and Calder, is correct in its approach, and even if one is to reject it, it still needs to be recognized and discussed.	4
Second, and more important, I do not feel that Professor Hallaq has given an accurate description of the development and nature of substantive law--furu' al-fiqh—or adequately accounted for its relationship to legal theory--usul al-fiqh. Substantive law clearly did not develop, as Professor Hallaq maintains, out of court decisions, nor does it integrate "all relevant and significant fatwas" (154). What is remarkable about furu' is its conservatism and its refusal to incorporate the vast body of fatwa material that accumulated over the centuries. As for the relationship between furu' and usul, in theory this is simple: usul, meaning literally the "roots" of law, represents the theoretical underpinning of furu', meaning literally the "branches." This does not, however, seem to be the case in reality. Furu' developed before usul, and it is usul that draw material from furu' rather than the other way round. My own suspicion (and it is no more than that) is that it is probably more useful to think of the two as separate genres, usul, with its emphasis on epistemology and logic, being more akin to theology or philosophy than to law. It also, clearly, can function as a mode of arguing about contemporary issues. Professor Hallaq certainly suggests this very strongly in his chapter on al-Shatibi, where he suggests that this author was arguing for a middle way between the over-zealous interpretation of Islamic doctrine adopted by some sufis and the over-lax interpretation by some other groups. It seems clear, too, that for the modern theorists discussed in the final chapter, legal theory is a means of readjusting the basic Islamic belief in revelation to accommodate modern, rationalist thought. It seems to me unlikely that their theories have influenced, or ever will influence, practical legislation.	5
Colin Imber University of Manchester

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