The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E.

Download or read book The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E. written by Christopher Melchert and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-01-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sunni schools of law are named for jurisprudents of the eighth and ninth centuries, but they did not actually function so early. The main division at that time was rather between adherents of ra'y and ḥadīth. No school had a regular means of forming students. Relying mainly on biographical dictionaries, this study traces the constitutive elements of the classical schools and finds that they first came together in the early tenth century, particularly with the work of Ibn Surayj (d. 306/918), al-Khallāl (d. 311/923), and a series of ḥanafī teachers ending with al-Karkhī (d. 340/952). Mālikism prospered in the West for political reasons, while the ẓāhirī and Jarīrī schools faded out due to their refusal to adopt the common new teaching methods. In this book the author fleshes out these historical developments in a manner that will be extremely useful to the field, while at the same time developing some new and highly original perspectives.