Malik and Medina: Islamic Legal Reasoning in the Formative Period.

Lucas, Scott C.

Malik and Medina: Islamic Legal Reasoning in the Formative Period. By UMAR F. ABD-ALLAH WYMANN-LANDGRAF. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 101. Leiden: BRILL, 2013. Pp. xiv + 552. $277, [euro]199.

Malik and Medina is an ambitious and engaging work of scholarship. It argues (1) that Malik's concept of Medinese praxis ([??]amal) is a multifaceted legal tool that its critics long have failed to appreciate and (2) that most Western scholars have misunderstood the formative period of Islamic law. It is both a successful revision of the author's 1978 doctoral dissertation, "Malik's Concept of [??]Amal in the Light of MalikI Legal Theory," and a bold call for Western scholars to direct their gaze away from the presence of prophetic hadiths in early Islamic law to the far more significant role of ra[??]y ("considered opinion") in it. In short, Malik and Medina is required reading for all (advanced) students and scholars of early Islamic law.

The book consists of an introduction, ten chapters arranged into two parts, and a short conclusion. While the content of the book is rich and meticulously documented, the chapter arrangement is not optimal for the reader who is relatively new to early Maliki law. Chapter one provides a sketch of Malik's life and clarifies the differences between his "masterpiece," the Muwatta[??], and the Mudawwana of Sahnun. Chapter two offers a helpful overview of Malik's legal reasoning, which highlights his skillful usage of analogy, discretion (istihsan), preclusion (sadd al-dhara[??]i[??]), and the unstated good (al-masalih al-mursala). Wymann-Landgraf also stresses Malik's awareness and respect for dissent among the Medinese jurists, which is reflected in his usage of "concurrence" (ijtima[??]) instead of the more common term "consensus" (ijma[??]). There is also an illuminating comparison between the legal reasoning of Malik and Abu Hanlfa, in which Malik comes across as more daring in his use of discretion than the Kufan master of the proponents of considered opinion.

Chapters three and four discuss the reception of Medinese praxis by critics and advocates, including the well-known criticisms of al-Shaybani and al-Shafi[??]i, as well as the nuanced support of it in the correspondence between al-Layth b. Sa[??]d and Malik. A particularly useful passage in chapter four is al-QadI [??]Iyad's analysis of how the Malikis of each region accorded Medinese praxis differing degrees of authority (p. 234). These chapters might have been more beneficial had they been placed after the lengthy analysis of Medinese praxis (part two, pp. 273-506), because at this earlier point in the book the reader does not yet really know what it is and why it generated so much controversy.

Part two of Malik and Medina begins with chapter five, which outlines Malik's "archaic" terminology and prepares the reader for Wymann-Landgraf's valuable dissection of Medinese praxis. He divides Malik's terms into three categories, each of which receives a chapter filled with supporting evidence in the form of discrete legal topics. These categories are "Sunna terms," "Precept terms," and "Terms referring to the People of knowledge." Sunna terms are "types of praxis deemed to have originated with the Prophet" (p. 280); precept (amr) terms generally consist of post-prophetic opinions that have found wide (but not universal) acceptance among the Medinese scholars whom Malik trusts; and terms referring to the People of knowledge appear to indicate concurrence on a given legal position. Sandwiched in the middle of the chapters devoted to each of these categories is chapter eight, which treats Malik's use of the term [??]amal. Surprisingly, Malik does not use this term very often in the Muwatta[??]--the most common location for it is in chapter headings, especially those concerning ritual law.

The chapters on Malik's Sunna terms, precept terms, and terms referring to the People of knowledge are well organized and compelling. Wymann-Landgraf uses all of the recensions of the Muwatta[??] in which Malik's terminology is present, as well as Ibn "Abd al-Barr's lengthy commentaries on it, along with Sahnun's Mudawwana. Given that so much of the Muwatta[??] consists of Companion and Successor opinions, and that these opinions are enmeshed in (or challenge) Medinese praxis, Wymann-Landgraf also consults the Musannafa of [??]Abd al-Razzaq and Ibn Abi Shayba regularly. He shows repeatedly how Malik uses praxis terms in ca.ses in which significant dissent among jurists exists, both in Medina and elsewhere, and on topics for which few if any "solitary" (ahadi) prophetic hadiths were in circulation.

So what is Medinese praxis? The most common term Malik deploys is "the precept among us" (al-amr [??]indand), which Wymann-Landgraf argues does not indicate Medinese concurrence on a topic and is linked to the practice of the Medinese judiciary. The second most common term is "the agreed precept among us," which does not explicitly rule out the existence of dissent (ikhtilaf) among a few Medinese authorities. Wymann-Landgraf observes that terms indicating complete consensus without dissent, such as "the precept without dissent among us," are very rare in the Muwatta[??]. There is tremendous variety among Malik's Sunna terms, and Wymann-Landgraf argues that they are clearly connected to issues over which significant legal debate had arisen. (He also speculates that the Sunna terms are the oldest stratum of transmissional praxis and date back to the time of the Prophet and Companions.) Regarding the Medinese people of knowledge, Wymann-Landgraf observes that "praxis is used to verify that the Medinese people of knowledge regarded certain acts of prominent Companions to constitute the desired norm" (p. 356).

In his conclusion, as well as elsewhere throughout Malik and Medina, Wymann-Landgraf declares that the broader objective behind his book is to persuade the reader that "the [legal] schools grew up during the first three centuries of Islam as consistent, yet largely unspoken legal methodologies with distinctive bodies of positive law systematically based on them" (p. 507). His primary target of criticism is the prevailing orthodoxy in Western scholarship that al-ShafiT was the "master architect" of Islamic law and that his legal theory had a significant impact on the earlier schools of Malik and Abu Hanifa, or the subsequent school of Ibn Hanbal. He also argues emphatically that dissent was an integral part of the methodologies of early jurisprudence, and ijtihad was "the real stuff" of Islamic law, not hadiths. His critique of the so-called "great synthesis" theory culminates in his call for a "four school" paradigm to replace the "four sources" paradigm that Western scholars generally promote as the mature, formative articulation of Islamic law. This proposed paradigm is first articulated in the conclusion, p. 509 of the book, the placement of which prevents a thorough defense of it, although it would be fascinating to see Wymann-Landgraf develop this paradigm in future publications.

Wymann-Landgraf's defense of pre-Shafi[??]i jurisprudence as mature, complex, and fully engaged with dissenting opinions is compelling. Since Joseph Schacht, many Western scholars have displayed something bordering on an obsession with legal hadiths, so many of which are ambiguous, defective, or tangential to the vast majority of legal cases. They also assume that hadiths were largely absent from legal reasoning prior to al-Shafi[??]i, after whom the Muslim world became awash with forged hadiths. Wymann-Landgraf makes the very significant point that the paucity of legal hadiths must not be confused with the notion of an absence of hadiths. In a footnote he writes, "The relative paucity of legal hadith does not mean that legal hadiths were few. [...] Legal hadiths are relatively few, however, when measured against the massive and intricately detailed corpus of early and later Islamic positive law and the immense body of juristic dissent that grew up around it" (p. 24). The Muwatta[??] contains about 250 prophetic hadiths, which is not a trivial sum, although many of them are found in Malik's extra-legal chapters. However, it also covers over two thousand legal topics, the vast majority of which lacked prophetic hadiths in Malik's day--and still lack sound hadiths today, centuries after al-Shafi'[??]'s "canonization" of Islamic law, to use Ahmed El Shamsy's expression.

One interesting question that Malik and Medina refrains from addressing is the relationship between the descendants of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt) and Medinese praxis. Medina was the home not only of Ibn [??]Umar, [??]Urwa b. al-Zubayr, and al-Zuhrl, but also of [??]All b. al-Husayn Zayn al-[??]Abidin, Muhammad al-Baqir, Zayd b. [??]Ali, and Ja[??]far al-Sadiq. According to most Western scholars, Shi[??]i jurisprudence was developing in Medina prior to and simultaneously with the life of Malik, and yet these descendants of the Prophet seem to be excluded from Malik's Muwatta[??] and Medinese practice--according to the indices of Bashshar Ma[??]ruf's critical edition of Yahya's recension of the Muwatta[??], for example, [??]Umar's personal opinions are cited over two hundred times, while [??]Ali's are quoted a mere twenty-one times, fewer than even those of [??]Uthman. There is not a single citation of the opinions of Zayd b. [??]Ali or of his half-brother, Muhammad al-Baqir. Is Medinese praxis a response to the practice of the family of the Prophet, several prominent members of which also happened to live in Medina? Was it a strategy to marginalize or even exclude the legal opinions of the descendants of the Prophet, some of whom raised revolts during Malik's own lifetime? These questions merit further investigation and should shed additional light on Malik's concept of Medinese praxis.

Malik and Medina demonstrates the profound value of reading classical works of Islamic law thoroughly and paying close attention to their authors' technical terms. No contemporary reading of the Muwatta[??] in Western scholarship comes close to what Wymann-Landgraf has accomplished. The author is to be praised for publishing his ground-breaking research, which also engages the secondary literature in German, English, and Italian, and Brill's editors are to be applauded for including it in their Islamic History and Civilization series.

SCOTT C. LUCAS

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, TUCSON