The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law, by David R. Vishanoff

Abstract

The hermeneutical aspects of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), defined by the author of the present book as “the part of legal the-ory that focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the language of a scriptural canon” (p. xiii), has in recent decades been subject of a few significant detail studies, but not of any comprehensive systema-tic treatment. The present book provides a first comprehensive and systematic analysis of the development of Sunnī legal hermeneutics from its origins through the first half of the 5th/11th century, descri-bed by the author as “the formative or preclassical period of Islamic legal hermeneutics.” The classical period, Vishanoff explains, began “in the second half of the 5th/11th century, which witnessed a sudden proliferation of major works that would become enduring points of reference for the discipline by scholars such as Abū l-Walīd al-Bājī, Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, Abū l-ʿUsr al-Bazdawī, Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī, al-Sarakhsī, al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿAqīl, and Ibn Barhān” (p. xv).

Keywords

• Islamic Hermeneutics
• How Sunni Legal Theorists
• David R. Vishanoff