Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

174 t CHAPTER SEVEN
what problematic, however. There was no Codex Juris Civilis as
there was in the Roman Empire and no Codex Juris Canonici as
there was in the Christian Church. There was only a (barely)
emerging consensus of an ill-defined body of individuals who interested
themselves in legal questions and who could be found in
informal circles in the major Muslim centers. They were not judges
in that they did not adjudicate, nor lawyers in that they did not
plead, but what we might call law school professors, had there
been at that point any law schools or anything resembling professors.
They were simply Muslims whose avocation was sharia—
Islam’s rabbis, though without either the judicial or the liturgical
functions of the latter.
Traditional Muslim societies have been as dominated by lawyers
as the parallel Jewish ones, and it may be useful at the outset to lay
out some of the modulations in which Muslim jurisprudence appears.
The common Arabic term for one learned in the law is alim,
plural, ulama, quite simply, “the learned” or “the experts.” But
their learning is formal: they have been trained—at first they seem
to have trained themselves—in the science of jurisprudence (fiqh),
hence the ulama are also more functionally known as fuqaha (sing.
faqih), “jurisprudents.” Islamic jurisprudence is a scholarly and
academic subject, eventually pursued in the madrasa, an institution
formalized in the eleventh century and designed, like the Jewish
yeshiva, to provide such scholastic training. But the faqih might
don two other caps; though not simultaneously. He could be recruited
by the political authorities to render justice and so assume
the state-sponsored and salaried position of judge (qadi); or he
might, if requested, consent to render an opinion on a practical
matter of the law, a fatwa, as it was called, or indeed many such,
and so serve in the generally unofficial, though widely recognized,
position of mufti.
Judgments and Opinions
Sharia emerges into our line of vision early in the ninth century,
and with it, the profile of those experts, the ulama, who produced