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Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt

subsequent jurists established between legal rules and canonical texts is undoubtedly quite real: once a text is interpreted as supporting a legal doctrine, it is the basis of that legal doctrine, whose existence and authoritativeness are then explained by that text. Other explanations of the doctrine, however, are also possible. Islamic law can be (and has been) explained as the product of all kinds of social and intellectual factors, even though it is imagined by jurists (and by El Shamsy) to be the product of scientific, systematic, repeatable, and falsifiable interpretive reasoning based on textual evidence (70, 189). El Shamsy’s book conflates ideology with constructive method. Having pointed out that al-Shāfiʿī’s hermeneutical tools were innovative, he spends surprisingly little time exploring their nature or function, and seems to take for granted that they did in fact dictate the results of interpretation – not infallibly but still decisively – so that somehow, over the course of the third/ninth century, Islamic law really did become a scripturally revealed law not only in theory but also in substance and method. That, I suspect, is the fundamental issue behind his recent critique (2014) of my own book (2011). I do not recognize as my own the dismissiveness about Hadith, the disdain for al-Shāfiʿī, or the enthusiasm for literalism (which I consider a hermeneutical fantasy) for which El Shamsy chastises me, but I do recognize that we disagree on this question: does affirming a textualist ideology actually make the substance of one’s legal doctrine a function of the canonized text? El Shamsy’s overly dramatic but insightful and articulate book tacitly furthers that debate.