Harald Motzki is the most prominent contemporary scholar of early Islamic jurisprudence and hadith studies, and this translation of his seminal work Die Anfänge der islamischen Jurisprudenz: Ihre Entwicklung in Mekka bis zur Mitte des 2./8. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1991) will make his revision of the Schachtian model much more accessible. In 1950, Joseph Schacht opened a 150-year gap between the lifetime of Muhammad and the first authentic legal texts of the nascent schools of the 8th and 9th centuries by questioning the authenticity of the hadiths contained in those legal texts. Schacht concluded that isnāds, which claimed to provide transmission histories during the first 100 years of Islam, were fabricated and arbitrary. It is this conclusion that Motzki seeks to overturn.

In his first chapter, Motzki provides an excellent survey of development of skepticism towards hadiths starting with Sachau, von Kremer, and Goldziher. His focus, however, is on Schacht. He attempts to demonstrate that Schacht relied on questionable assumptions and methods, which made his main conclusions untenable. In particular, Schacht's “e silentio procedure” proves problematic, since the recorded hadiths do not represent all the extant hadiths at the time (pp. 21–22). Motzki provides an example later in the book to demonstrate that authorities did not necessarily cite all of the relevant hadiths that they knew.

The second chapter analyzes the Musannaf of

Abd al-Razzaq al-San

ani (744–827), a source that had been unavailable to Schacht. In the course of investigating the transmission of this text and of its sources, Motzki concludes that the extant text “very probably reproduces faithfully

Abd al-Razzaq's teaching material” (p. 72). Also, the diversity and unique characteristics of each of the three major sources in the Musannaf suggest to Motzki that

Abd al-Razzaq did not forge these materials.

The third chapter (about three-quarters of the book) attempts to demonstrate that the earlier sources within the Musannaf are authentic and, having done that, to reconstruct the development of jurisprudence in Mecca. He does this by examining the material ascribed to

Ata

ibn Rabah and

Amr ibn Dinar, especially as transmitted by Ibn Jurayj. Motzki's basic assumption is that, had the traditions been produced by systematic projection or fabrication, “one would expect uniformity” (p. 81). This lack of uniformity is evident in external and internal criteria. The external criteria include genre (dicta versus responsa, and the variations within these genres, such as personal material versus that from others) and the proportion of earlier sources that are cited. The internal criteria include the relative use of ra

y, statements by Muhammad, and statements by his Companions; the use and quality of isnāds, terminology of transmission, anonymous transmission, and indirect transmission; and such noteworthy features as disagreement with earlier sources, variant traditions, uncertainty, the infrequency of reference to the Companions, and the marginal significance of Prophetic traditions. All of this diversity leads Motzki to conclude that the material is largely authentic.

Motzki then suggests that Meccan fiqh has its roots in the teaching of Ibn

Abbas, but that even at the end of the 7th century

Ata

, for instance, normally expressed his own opinion and only occasionally cited the Prophet or Companions. By the time of Ibn Jurayj in the first quarter of the 2nd century, more traditions were being used to support legal views. Even so, Motzki concludes that even as early as the 1st century, both the Qur

an and the Prophet were invoked as sources of law, a conclusion that undercuts the main theories of Schacht (and John Wansbrough).

Die Anfänge der islamischen Jurisprudenz, or this translation, is a must read for every scholar of early Islam. (The English version offers the reader the added benefit providing Motzki's responses to critiques of the original German version). By arguing that the beginnings of Islamic fiqh lie one-half to three-quarters of a century earlier than Schacht had proposed, Motzki seems to have shown that Schacht was incorrect in his generalization that most isnāds were fabricated and thus also seems to undercut much of the scholarship on the development of Islamic jurisprudence of the past fifty years. Furthermore, by arguing that a number of hadiths are authentically attributable to Muhammad's Companions, who are a link to Muhammad himself, Motzki can further argue that they represent “a historical kernel” (p. xiv). Many “sanguine”/“traditionalist” scholars will see Motzki's work as the final word on whether hadiths can be trusted. Many “skeptical”/“revisionist” scholars will not be convinced, but the burden of proof has shifted to them: Motzki's detailed evidence and strong arguments must be addressed. Some might object that the Musannaf is not an authored work but a later collected work and so its sources might not be as authentic as Motzki suggests. Others would contend that Motzki's assumption that either traditions are systematically fabricated (in which case there should be much uniformity) or mostly authentic (in which case there is much diversity) is too simplistic. Traditions may have been unsystematically (and not consciously) fabricated, which would also produce the obvious lack of uniformity, especially if, as Motzki himself suggests, oral and written transmission sources were “inextricably intertwined” (p. 104). The debate is clearly far from over, and Schachtian skepticism might yet prevail, but Motzki's paradigm is likely to replace that of Schacht for quite some time.