Anyone who has taught a survey course on Islamic law will be enormously grateful to Professor Hallaq for providing this succinct, up-to-date, and stimulating account of the early history of Islamic law. The standard works in English, by Coulson and Schacht, are more than forty years out of date and hampered by, among other things, vacuousness (in Coulson's case) and a frequently impenetrable civil-law speak (in Schacht's). Thus, Hallaq remedies a serious shortcoming in the field (along with the recent survey by Knut Vikør, Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law). Hallaq's latest contribution offers more, however, than a mere textbook. It is a fresh and often provocative account of early Islamic legal history.

Hallaq zeroes in on four features that, in his view, came to be characteristic of Islamic law from the Middle Ages to the colonial period: “a complete judiciary,” a vast and elaborate collection of positive legal doctrines, a “science of legal methodology and interpretation,” and “doctrinal legal schools” (madhāhib) (p. 3). He regards the emergence of these phenomena as substantially complete by the middle of the 10th century and so takes that as the endpoint of his investigation. The chapters follow, more or less, this quadripartite division of the subject. In chapter 1, Hallaq deals with pre-Islamic legal traditions, Muhammad, and the Qurءan. Chapters 2 through 4 cover the Arab conquests, the rise of a class of private legal specialists, and early concepts of legal authority, but focus consistently on the evolution of the office of judge (qadi) as a central feature of the birth of an Islamic legal system. Chapters 5 and 6 outline the beginnings of systematic reasoning and the maturation of concepts of authority as well as the pre- and early histories of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). Chapter 7 deals with the formation of the doctrinal schools, and chapter 8 focuses on the relationship between law and politics. A conclusion adjusts a few points of emphasis and laments the demise of the classical system of Islamic law under the pressures of the colonialist enterprise and the subsequent rise of the modern nation-state. In addition to an ample bibliography of primary sources, Hallaq provides a hefty bibliography of secondary sources, separate bibliographies of secondary sources tied to individual chapters, and a short list of articles grouped together under the rubric of “Dating Early Legal Texts” (although it might have been called “Norman Calder and his Critics”).

A number of recurring themes emerge in this rich and stimulating account, some of which are anticipated in Hallaq's previous publications. First, Hallaq argues that pre-Islamic Arabia was well integrated into the wider legal culture of the Near East (“a part of the cultural continuum that had dominated the Near East since the time of the Sumerians,” p. 8). Thus, the pre-Islamic Arabian background to Islamic law is viewed as generally productive (i.e., not limited to a few forms of contract and some rules governing injuries to the person), and early Islamic law itself is portrayed as a somewhat self-contained development sharing with neighboring legal cultures only a common background, not a relationship of linear dependence, influence, or even occasional borrowing. Second, the early textual record, although acknowledged as “historically problematic” and “qualitatively insufficient” (p. 2), seems to present few problems of interpretation in practice. Third, Hallaq emphasizes, across several chapters, the pivotal role of judges in the birth and development of Islamic law. This aspect of the book reflects Hallaq's extensive reading in (among other things) two major sources for the history of the early Islamic judiciary, al-Kindī's Kitab qudat Misr and Wakīʿ's Akhbar al-qudat. Fourth, the Islamic legal system, in its mature form, constitutes an integrated and organic whole in which rulers recognize and enhance the authority of jurists by appointing them as judges and in which those judges apply legal doctrines that are developed in the main by private jurists, who in turn elaborate norms through the scrupulous application of the techniques described in the literature of uṣūl al-fiqh. Although Hallaq stresses the private nature of much legal activity, he does not see the conflict between governmental and religious authority as a productive factor. Islamic law emerges in this portrayal as a smoothly functioning system that is exactly what it purports to be.

Those problems that do arise in the study of early Islamic law seem mostly to stem from the secondary literature. For instance, Hallaq dismisses, in a curt footnote (p. 55, fn. 78), a considerable body of recent (and interesting) scholarship on the sometimes puzzling role of the Qurءan in early Islamic law. He also dismisses Christopher Melchert's helpful study of the formation of the Sunni schools of law as resting on the mistaken premise that the doctrinal schools evolved out of personal schools (p. 164, fn. 17). He sharply criticizes Joseph Schacht in several places (pp. 2, 103, 117) but acknowledges that the emergence of a specifically Prophet-centered concept of legal authority was the result of a long and gradual process, which is not so far from Schacht's account (see pp. 46–52; as a field, we too often ignore Schacht's relatively successful attempt to trace the development of concepts of authority in early legal thought).

However, Hallaq's scholarship, prodigious and important in equal measure, has always had a consistent and pronounced revisionist streak. Hallaq has not taken this opportunity to survey the state of the field, meditate on its strengths and weaknesses, assess the problems that confront researchers, and propose routes for future inquiry. In contrast, the fact that he has offered his own view of the rise of Islamic law, relatively uncluttered by competing accounts, is useful in its own right. Because much of the book is based on Hallaq's original research, it represents a generous contribution by a major scholar in his period of maturity who shares with his colleagues a tightly argued and thoroughly documented vision of early Islamic law based on wide (and intelligent) reading in primary sources. Evidence of the dire need for this work is shown by the difficulty I had procuring a paltry ten copies to teach a small graduate seminar: the book appeared in 2005, but by December 2005 it had mostly sold out, at least in the United States. I will be using it in graduate and undergraduate classes for the foreseeable future (are you listening, Cambridge?), and scholars will be poring over it for years to come.