Anthology of Islamic Legal Theory

Uṣūl al-fiqh — Islamic legal theory — is the discipline through which Muslim scholars determined how divine revelation becomes binding law. Opening with a substantial English-language introduction to the discipline and its major schools, this anthology gathers Arabic primary-source excerpts from seven legal-theological traditions (Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī, Imāmī, Zaydī and Ibāḍī), spanning the eighth to the twenty-first centuries. Rather than ordering texts by school or chronology, it arranges them across ten themes. In doing so, this book reveals the uṣūl al-fiqh discipline as a trans-madhhab discourse with shared questions and competing answers.Drawing on foundational works of legal theory from al-Shāfiʿī’s al-Risāla through to modern Najaf seminary manuals, this volume makes visible a shared analytical discourse that is obscured through a school-based or chronological lens.