Read Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam for Free Online

“nascent Maliki school” 52 rather than a full-fledged classical madhhab. Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi ' i serve as useful shorthand for identifying loosely affiliated clusters of jurists who (usually) congre- gated in certain areas and were engaged in both internal and external
    debates over legal method and doctrine. One must keep in mind the fluid nature of school boundaries, lest the terms become more a hin- drance than a help. In referring to jurists throughout this book with eponymous labels, I intend something along the lines of Peter Henni- gan’s provisional use of the identifier Hanafi: “ ‘Hanafi’ defines a legal culture in which an identifiable group of jurists—who were later (re)- contextualized as ‘Hanafis’—cited to and disputed with one another.” 53

    Reading Legal Texts
    Hennigan’s reference to citation and disputation highlights core practices of jurisprudential culture. Both left traces in the texts. References to re- spected predecessors helped trace the line of authority for a particular position, or supported a particular position in arguments with colleagues. Disputation could be internal (acknowledging differing opinions within a group, as with the various Medinan authorities cited in the Mudaw- wana or differences between Abu Hanifa and Abu Yusuf in the J a mi ® al- S agh i r ) or external (Abu Hanifa’s view against Malik’s, or that of Shafi ' i against Shaybani). Argumentative practices helped define the boundar- ies between groups of jurists. As Alasdair MacIntyre famously noted, traditions necessarily have external boundaries and internal divisions. 54 From an outsider’s perspective, the Sunni jurists under study here con- stitute a single tradition. Engaged in a legal approach to regulating Muslim lives, they share certain assumptions, approaches, and values, as well as authoritative texts. Additional core agreements defined distinctively Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi ' i traditions. Each has characteristic doctrines, particular themes, and concerns that emerge repeatedly. Internally, they engaged with issues of concern to their predecessors, and in conversation with them, in “an argument extended through time.” 55 Jurists also en- gaged in conversation, debate, and argument with contemporaries outside of their increasingly self-contained schools.
    Formative-period texts express and defend doctrines, sharing, dis- puting, modifying, adapting, and rejecting them both within and across geographical and chronological boundaries and across groups of adher- ents. Doctrines and supporting evidence emerge as fragments of a con- versation. Sometimes we are able to hear both halves of it, but at other times we can only infer what the other portion must, or at least might, have been. Attending to this discursive nature of the legal tradition is
    vital to understanding it, even as the fixity of writing, especially near the end of the formative period, affected how composition and trans- mission occurred.
    It is necessary to say a word about the relationship between legal texts and social practice. At one level, texts were the outcome of social processes. They were affected by the material conditions of their pro- duction. Patterns of thought were defined in part by who met whom, where information was transmitted and shared, who could travel in order to study with recognized authorities. 56 Networks of conversation across a deeply interconnected Muslim world, with strong circulation not only of goods but of people and ideas, led to locally inflected forms of Islam coming into contact with and being challenged by other norms and practices. The texts discussed here were produced from Andalusia to Iraq over the course of a century or two. Some of the differences among jurists’ doctrines have been explained, in part, by social phe- nomena in their places of origin. Greater Maliki rights for slaves, for in- stance, have been attributed to the relative egalitarianism of Medina, while Hanafi