A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory

I agree with the condescending language, but it helps to create debate.

Again, you are contradicting yourself in the same paragraph. How can you obey an inauthentic (ahad) hadith even though you will discard it in favour of a mutawatir hadith? Or if you have one ahad hadith overrule another? What does it mean to “obey” it if it is overruled?

You seem to be confused about what was understood to be the “Sunnah”. This is discussed in Wael Hallaq’s work on the sharia. The reason why these scholars (as opposed to the ahl al-hadith scholars) aren’t fixated on specific hadiths is because they understood the Sunnah to have been transmitted, yes, through texts but also through practice, specifically of those who lived with the Prophet himself. This is why, in particular, the Maliki and Hanafi schools tend to prioritize the actions of the sahaba over specific reports. They believe that if a sahabi, for example, prayed in a certain way, that has the same or even higher epistemological value than a report that gives a description of the way he prayed. This is why they tend to interpret and weigh up the texts of the hadith in the light of the actions of the sahaba.

Exactly, al-Juwayni does *not* say that all reports are to be obeyed. Do you not see the contradiction to what you wrote in the previous block?

Again, you are not being faithful to what al-Juwayni actually wrote. He does *not* claim that nearly all reports have to be obeyed. He is making a distinction between mutawatir and ahad reports, that is the only point he is making, whereas you are reading things into that statement. He is certainly *not* saying that all or nearly all ahad reports are the same. You have ahad reports that are mawdu’ (fabricated), for example. No one would argue that these have to be obeyed. The reason why he doesn’t spell this out here is because he is making an entirely different point. Simply go back to the chapters about abrogration and concensus, and you’ll see that he has already explained that reports that are abrogated or those that are not to be followed by consensus are not to be obeyed.

Your conclusion doesn’t seem to fit with what those historians are arguing (particularly Dickinson). You seem to be saying that narrators were accepted as trustworthy if they agreed with the zeitgeist whereas what is being said here is that narrators were deemed reliable if their reports were corroborated, i.e. it wasn’t just a matter of trusting a narrators memory but you had to compare what he was saying with what others were saying about the same thing. So if I say that my teacher was wearing a fedora whereas the rest of the students in the class say that he was hatless – that is when I am deemed unreliable. There were objective criteria, as opposed to a general understanding that I have a weak memory.

No, al-Juwayni speaks here of “actions”. Not doing something is, first of all, not an action in this context but rather its opposite. Nevertheless, even if we were to refer to it as an action, jurists *not* doing something does not give it the legal status of forbidden. It could be makruh (disliked), but even that would be a stretch. In fact, the default would be to consider it mubah, i.e. that the shari’a is neutral toward it, because the general principle is that everything is allowed unless explicitly prohibited and someone neglecting to taste something does certainly not amount to an explicit prohibition. However, if certain jurista had explicitly prohibited it, and the rest of the scholars remained silent on this issue, then you could invoke al-Juwayni’s point here.

The problem with this example is that whilst al-Juwayni here discusses the Prophet’s *actions* the question of the legal status of the beard belongs to the realm of his *commandments* (a hadith tells us that the beard should be grown) and hence was discussed by al-Juwayni in an earlier chapter.

This is a very condescending section. France – a Western country, no? – espouses religious freedom, yet many religious acts are nevertheless criminalized because they are considered primarily political. Similarly, public apostasy is prohibited in Islamic law.

Thank you, Salman, for this confirmation and illustration of the practice.