Overview

This book studies the legal reasoning of Mālik ibn Anas (d. 179 H./795 C.E.) in the Muwaṭṭa’ and Mudawwana. Although focusing on Mālik, the book presents a broad comparative study of legal reasoning in the first three centuries of Islam. It reexamines the role of considered opinion (ra’y), dissent, and legal ḥadīths and challenges the paradigm that Muslim jurists ultimately concurred on a “four-source” (Qurʾān, sunna, consensus, and analogy) theory of law. Instead, Mālik and Medina emphasizes that the four Sunnī schools of law (madhāhib) emerged during the formative period as distinctive, consistent, yet largely unspoken legal methodologies and persistently maintained their independence and continuity over the next millennium.

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9789004773417

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Reviews

“…an enormously important study of early Islamic law that does for the Mālikī school what has not been achieved for any of the other schools, namely, providing a systematic analysis of its foundational texts of positive law.” - Ahmed El Shamsy, in: Ilahiyat Studies 5/1 (2014), pp. 126-131. ""Mālik 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 Muwaṭṭa 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 in secondary literatures in German, English, and Italian..."" - Scott C. Lucas, University of Arizona, Tucson, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society 137/3 (2017)

Author Information

Dr. Umar F. Abd-Allah Wymann-Landgraf (Ph.D, University of Chicago, 1978) taught at the Universities of Windsor, Temple, Michigan, and King Abdul-Aziz. He has authored numerous books and articles on Islam and Islamic studies and is currently engaged in independent research, writing, and teaching on Islamic theology, spirituality, law, and history.

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