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1. TOPIC AND SCOPE

Islamic jurisprudence (Arabic fiqh) stands out among currently practiced traditions of legal thinking for its long and uninterrupted history of development, which stretches back over a millennium. While scholarship in the past decades has disproved earlier, Orientalist claims that Islamic jurisprudence remained static and unchanging for much of its long history, the precise mechanisms through which change in Islamic jurisprudence has taken place remain a subject of debate. Recent publications have identified processes of legal standardization and attribution of authority—often called ‘canonization’ or ‘codification’—as particularly important for understanding how fiqh changes, but they have also underlined the need for further research on the reasons, stages, and consequences of such processes.1 Concomitantly, the fields of Islamic intellectual history and anthropology of knowledge have a long-standing interest in studying processes of knowledge transmission, epistemic changes, and intellectual developments in Muslim societies and communities, but such studies often focus on the broader Islamic tradition or scholarly disciplines other than jurisprudence.2 Consequently, the currently available and, in part, highly sophisticated methods of studying knowledge transmission and intellectual change in Islamic learning have not yet been sufficiently applied to the question of how canonized legal knowledge is transmitted in Muslim societies and communities, a state of affairs that makes it impossible to fully grasp the dynamics of the development of fiqh across time and space. In other words, we currently lack a proper understanding of how knowledge transmission shapes processes in which standardized legal knowledge is shared, applied, and enacted in Muslim communities and, conversely, how processes of transmission, in turn, tend to standardize certain combinations, sets, and versions of Islamic legal knowledge.3

Issue Section:
Editorial
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