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Long before the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, Arabia had come to form an integral part of the Near East. This book, covering more than three centuries of legal history, presents an important account of how Islam developed its own law while drawing on ancient Near Eastern legal cultures, Arabian customary law and Quranic reforms. The development of the judiciary, legal reasoning and legal authority during the first century is discussed in detail as is the dramatic rise of prophetic authority, the crystallization of legal theory and the formation of the all-important legal schools. Finally the book explores the interplay between law and politics, explaining how the jurists and the ruling elite led a symbiotic existence that - seemingly paradoxically - allowed Islamic law and its application to be uniquely independent of the 'state'.… (more)
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First sentence is "One of the fundamental features of the so-called modern Islamic resurgence is the call to restore the
The last sentence is "The rise of modern dictatorships in the wake of the colonial experiences of the Muslim world is merely one tragic result of the process in which modernity wreaked violence on venerated traditional cultures."
Law is a cornerstone "in the reaffirmation of Islamic identity". The author does not seem perplexed by the irony -- a modern resurgence of religious law, a revenant claim of uniqueness behind a thrust for global dominance. Further, the author asserts that "even though the formative and modern periods" are two of the "most studied epochs", somehow they "remain comparatively unexplored". Perhaps this reflects the experience which scholars discover as they search for the Origins of Islamic Law--it disappears before it gets to 622. In the author's own words: "The quality of the sources from the first centuries of Islam is historiographically problematic." In my words, it is mythic.
The author notes that we now know that Joseph Schacht's findings have to be incorrect, and the all-important legal schools as "personal juristic entities" did not come into existence for another century--around the middle of the 10th century. [2]