Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 1 9t r a ry to the messages of humility and equality proclaimed by Muhammad,many Muslims sought rules to live by in the words of the Qur’anic revelationand the precedent of prophetic practice ( s u n n a ) . These sources were thusbrought to bear on contemporary issues in a changing world, and the foundationsof Muslim jurisprudence ( f i q h ) were constructed. Methodologies of legalreasoning were systematized both for interpreting the legal injunctions containedin scripture and for discovering ways of arriving at legal decisions in themany cases for which neither the Qur’an nor the s u n n a provides a clear ruling.By the end of the ninth century, Islamic law was the queen of the sciences inthe Muslim curriculum. By that time, a number of prominent teachers of Muslimjurisprudence had come to be viewed as especially authoritative, and theirteachings formed the bases for diverse schools of Islamic legal thought. Eachschool ( m a d h h a b ) conceived of itself as possessing a particularly effective modeof interpreting the primary sources of Islam—the Qur’an and h a d i t h—in orderto determine proper human understanding of God’s law. After the tenth centu ry, four of these schools eclipsed the others, and these four have since coexistedas equally authoritative approaches to jurisprudence in Sunni Islam.Teachers of Islamic law belonging to one of these four schools—the Hanafi,Shafi’i, Maliki, and Hanbali—make up the u l a m a , the scholars of Islam whoare central to the transmission and development of Islamic learning.For most of Islamic history, these scholarly processes of determining the lawwere the special preserve of the u l a m a as traditionally trained religious scholars.In the modern period, however, the u l a m a’s monopoly on such discussionshas been broken. In the process, many new groups and individuals have takenit upon themselves to write on Islamic legal issues and even to issue their ownlegal opinions ( f a t w a ) , whether or not they have the specialized religious trainingand traditional authority to do so. Contemporary examples of such challengesto the u l a m a’s authority run the gamut from the support for a progressiveagenda for women’s rights produced by the Malaysian group Sisters inIslam to Osama bin Laden’s militant proclamations of global j i h a d .In the early centuries of Islamic history, the law developed by the u l a m a f o rregulating individual and social practice grew in popularity, and Muslim statesgranted a degree of respect and recognition to the system. However, the law ofIslam—the s h a r i ’ a—was rarely the sole legal standard in Islamic lands, and itwas applied at best selectively by most of the major Muslim empires andsmaller states. Most medieval Muslim rulers, even if they had the will to do so,were unable to establish themselves as the sole authorities and arbiters of Islamiclaw (Gerber 1999, 43–54). This situation was exacerbated by the fact thatthe interpretation and application of Islamic law was increasingly being developedin institutions that were outside direct state control and whose jurisdictionssometimes complemented those of civil courts, addressing different issues,and sometimes, when both venues had significant claims on a case,