One may assume that The Logic of Law Making in Islam: Women and Prayer in the Legal Tradition is a title calculated to attract a mass readership in the world today, where many think that Islamic law is repressive to women and wedded to physical punishments. But it is not that simple. The book's argument is highly abstract for the amateur reader. As the title suggests, it is focused on a case study – the question of women and communal prayer, from the eighth century to the eighteenth – in order to determine the reasoning process of the Hanafi School, the largest of the four Sunni schools of law. The main purpose of the book is to make us encounter fresh ways of thinking about positive law in Islam. Is Islam's legal tradition an agent of closure, which blocks the way of enquiry? Sadeghi attempts to answer this question by making the Islamic tradition face common features from the Western legal tradition, through the work of Alan Watson. He presents the Hanafi tradition as espousing what he calls ‘maximal hermeneutic flexibility’ (p 8). But this flexibility is not advocating a feminist reading. It is more interested in exposing the lack of attention to the Islamic canon, even when it adheres to conservative rules. For this exploration, the author engages 30 Hanafi jurists across different periods.

The first two chapters introduce the study of legal traditions, a description that assumes foundational similarities between Islamic and non-Islamic legal traditions, religious and secular (pp xiii, 9–11, 23), followed by a more focused introduction to the Hanafi School of law. This is followed with case studies concerning the legal tradition relating to women and group prayer. The first case study relates to the history of the so-called ‘adjacency law’ (Chapter 3), a distinctly Hanafi law according to which, if a man and a woman prayed in congregation standing side by side, his prayer would be invalidated but hers would not. The law is a vestige of an Iraqi minority notion with origins in Basra that treated women as perpetual transmitters of ritual impurity. The other cases of female group prayer and communal prayers of men and women show that the jurists had mustered enough hermeneutic flexibility to allow them to reconcile what the author calls the ‘canon-blind law’ (p 15) with the canon. Older laws are often maintained, owing to the paramountcy of ‘inertia’ (p 19). This means for the author that, while jurists would not have countenanced older pre-Islamic values, they were perfectly able to live with certain laws, giving different explanations for the law from the original ones. In the case of changing laws, he gives the example of women's attendance at public prayers, which culminated in a total prohibition in the thirteenth century. This change is reflective not of the ‘canon’ but of extra-legal and extra-textual factors, such as social changes, that would warrant non-legal research. Therefore, he suggests that law is not connected to human conditions but abstracted from them (p 144), which he believes to be a feature common to both pre-modern Islam and modern jurisprudence (p 147).

The doyen of Orientalist scholarship on Islamic law, Joseph Schacht, is referenced extensively and Sadeghi rightly notes how various scholars, such as Baber Johansen and Khaled Abu el-Fadl, Sherman Jackson and Wael Hallaq, have successfully questioned most of Schacht's theory (pp 8–10). Sadeghi refers more prominently to Sherman Jackson's important distinction between the more primary act of interpreting law and the secondary activity of legal implementation. Jackson showed, through Qarafi's theory, that it was not the law but only the legal process that was ceded to government, and even this functional requirement was limited to what was absolutely necessary for the preservation of order and security.Footnote ⁴ Sadeghi's book takes the discussion one step further, arguing that the hermeneutic practices (not only the hermeneutic theories, as Jackson suggested) of jurists in their works on positive law did not generate the laws. The hermeneutic principles thus played a negligible role in determining the laws (p 36).

Though the book is focused on the Hanafi school, it is a pity that the author does not make an effort to reflect the greater freedom of women in early Islam as other non-Muslim writers have done, especially that the great Sufi master Ibn ‘Arabi even permits women to act as prayer leaders for male congregations, on the basis of the Prophet's teaching that women as well as men have attained perfection, and of the absence of any scriptural prohibition.Footnote ⁵

Sadeghi also seems to express astonishment that Hanafi scholars resorted to weak Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet with little assurance of authenticity) in their adjudications (pp 68–69). This should not be too surprising. Many of the luminaries of mediaeval Islam followed a consensus that weak hadiths could be used in actions which were not considered obligatory but meritorious. They were also often used in stories and biographies. The great Imam al-Ghazali (d 1111), who was of Shafi'ite allegiance, would resort to weak hadiths in his major works, often for their socially convivial content. Even the more rigorous Ibn Hanbal used weak hadiths in matters of law, and preferred to do so over the use of analogy (qiyas) when there was a lack of a strong hadith.

Lastly, Sadeghi's suggestion that the jurists’ views did not mirror social reality stands contrary to the findings of another major study on Islamic law, totally skipped in this monograph: Lawrence Rosen's The Justice of Islam. Rosen argued that the system is bounded by a structure of conventions by which the non-legal world is set apart from the legal ‘but within which both that outside world and the peculiar institutions of the law itself have merged to form an entity of enormous cohesion and resilience’.Footnote ⁶ While Sadeghi's study seems rightly to refuse reducing the law to a mechanical obedience or a fixed and abstract body of codes, he seems to take the historical developments and critical arguments too seriously. This risks emptying the law of nearly all its positive content. Therefore, he would have needed to clarify whether he or the Hanafi tradition is obscuring the human conditions in which these laws were thought through.