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

Abstract

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 h adith. 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-Khallal (d. 311/923), and a series of h anafi teachers ending with al-Karkhi (d. 340/952). Malikism prospered in the West for political reasons, while the z ahiri and Jariri 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.