Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law, The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Abstract

In his book The Second Formation of Islamic Law, Guy Burak convincingly challenges an outmoded but omnipresent narrative of legal decline in Islamicate lands after 1250s. He does so not only by calling into question the grand narratives of Islamic legal history which situate the second half of the nineteenth century as the momentum of major rupture but also by offering a new periodization. He puts forward a strong argument that some of the supposedly nineteenth-century novelties, such as the codification of Islamic law, are extant already in the sixteenth century.