ABSTRACT

Islam began with a political triumph. The conquests of its first generation bequeathed it an empire of its own. As the conquest state fragmented, the Islamic society that it had created survived. One defining feature of that society, or more precisely, that network of kingdoms and cities that ultimately came to span a vast expanse from West Africa to Southeast Asia, was Islamic law. Kingdoms, empires and ethnic and tribal groups that manned them rose and fell. With the exception of the founding state of the Prophet at Medina, the law preceded the ruling regimes both temporally and logically. Whereas this double priority of law over the rulers is hardly disputable since after the third/ninth century (the watershed moment that symbolized the triumph of the Sunni ʿulama was the mihna of Ahmad b. Hanbal), the history of the formative period up to that point is less established. This formative period had witnessed the gradual consolidation of the law and a distinctive elite, the fuqahāʾ (sing. faqīh), associated with it, and the role of the state versus private juristic circles and schools. Apart from the tendency of all origins to be shrouded in the paucity of sources, the rapid and continuous revolutions of modernity as well as the ideologies and powers of orientalism have created knotty conceptual problems for Islamic history that more recent scholarship must, if ever imperfectly, strive to resolve.