Structural Interrelations of Theory and Practice in Islamic Law: A Study of Six Works of Medieval Islamic Jurisprudence

This volume introduces six texts of Islamic jurisprudence, authored by six jurists representing all four Sunni schools of Islamic law (two Ḥanafī, two Shāfiʿī, one Malikī, and one Ḥanbalī), who lived in areas as far apart as Uzbekistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza (Palestine), Egypt, and Algeria between the tenth and sixteenth centuries CE. My reading of these texts attempts to articulate an underlying structural interrelationship between theoretical and practical legal reasoning in the Islamic juristic tradition. This volume provides an anatomy of Islamic legal reasoning, centered on the basic concepts of human agency, responsibility, rights, legal hermeneutics, extra-textual sources of the law, and basic inquiries, such as the jurisdiction of law in Islam and the relationship between law and government and between law and theology.