Book Reviews 579 Book Review The Search for God's Law: Islamic Jurisprudence in the Writings of Sayf al-Din al-Amidi By Bernard G. Weiss. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992, 745 pp. When one works in the field of Shari'ah studies, a field widely perceived as holding little excitement (for those who pursue careers in it and for those who don't), one rarely encounters a book that sends one into the poetic ecstasy of a Keats, for example, on the occasion of his first looking into Chapman's Homer. Nonetheless, in any intellec­ tual enterprise there are joys that perhaps only the initiated, so to speak, may truly share. In fact, in the field of Shari'ah studies, as in many of the fields related to the study of classical Islamic disciplines, the esoteric delights to be tasted these days are many, particularly in view of the continual stream of carefully edited works from the classical period ... especially when so many of them were believed lost, eaten by worms in some dreary desert setting or sent tumbling toward eternity in the bloody waters of the Tigris when Baghdad was overrun by Mongol hordes. But, to return to the present, it is certainly not everyday that something really significant happens in the field. In The Search for God's Law, that significant something has happened. Less than a decade ago, a distinguished western scholar lamented in the Journal of the American Oriental Society that "despite the great interest shown in U$iil al fiqh by Orientalists throughout the world, no general and systematic work dealing with this most important Islamic 5 8 0 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 1 1 :4 science has been done.”’ Of course, what he meant to say was that no such work had been done in the West or in a western language. But orientalists and their orientalisms aside, the simple truth is that usiil al fiqh has been neglected by Muslims. As an essential tool in the pro- cess of ijtihad, it was only natural that if ijtihad were neglected then ~ ~ u ’ l alfiqh would suffer much the same fate. And so it did. As a dis- cipline, it was relegated to the world of the kutub FufrcS (the yellowed tomes), where it remained unchanged and unchallenged-an aca- demic axmadill-for centuries. In recent years, however, upil alfiqh has begun to receive serious scholarly attention. Manuscripts have been hunted down and edited, separate studies have been made of tra- ditional u@Zi subjects,z and there have even been some attempts to reconsider all Shari‘ah sciences from a contemporary perspective2 From an Islamization of knowledge perspective, the subject of z @ Z alfiqh’s applicability as a methodology for the social sciences has generated a great deal of interest and debate4 and, at least to the mind of this reviewer, the debate is going to be very important, if not crucial, to the future of the Islamization of knowledge. The reality of the situation, however, is such that many of the most important parti- cipants in the debate,’ particularly the social scientists, have never had access to the classical u@li works. This has been due either to their lack of Arabic or to the specialized vocabulary and prohibitive style in which so manyclassical works were written. Thus, the appearance of this book can only be viewed with pleasure and satisfaction by those who are close to this debate or to any other aspect of the Islami- zation of knowledge undertaking.5 Ah yes, and to those whose field is 1 Marie Bernard, “Hanafi Ujiil Al-Fiqh Through a Manuscript of Al-JaS$aS, Jour- nal of the American Oriental Society 105, no. 4 (1985). 2 See Taha JBbir a1 ‘Alwani, Source Methodology in Islamic Jurisprudence, 2d ed. (Hemdon, V A International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1994), 79-90. 3 Notable among these are the two works by Jamal al Din ‘A.tpah, a1 Tanzir a1 Fiqhi and a1 Naqariyah a1 ‘Ammah li a1 Shari‘ah a1 IslSmiyah (Cairo: Matba‘ah Madani yah 1. 4 See ‘Ala’a Mu$.- Anwar, “Azmat a1 Manhaj fi a1 ‘UlCim al Inaniyah,” Majaflat a1 Muslim a1 Mu‘cisir no. 55-56 (January-June 1990): 115-134, and ‘AbdulHamid AbBSulayman. Crisis in the Muslim Mind (Herndon. VA: International Instit‘ute of Islamic Thought, 1993), 35-46. 5 In his preface, Weiss writes: “I particularly hope that persons outside the field of Islamic studies will, despite its heaviness and (in places) denseness, find i t a useful introduction to the broad field of Islamic jurisprudence” (p. xxii). Book Reviews 581 Shari’ah studies, well, theirs is the pleasure of discovering, page by page and term by term, a superlative translation. Except that Weiss’s book is not a translation. More precisely, and to use his terminology, it is a “fundamentally expository” study of Sayf a1 Dm al h i d i ’ s “jurisprudential thinking” or his work on the subject of zqiil alfiqh as recorded in his two noteworthy works: Kitdb a1 Ihkiim fi a1 Ahkiim and M u n t a k a1 Szil fi ‘Ilm a1 Upil. Weiss writes: My exposition of Amidi’s ideas and of the dialectic in which he was involved must . . . be understood as selective. I have attempted to use my best judgment in deciding what to in- clude and what not to include. In general, I have tried to include those issues, ideas, positions, arguments, counter- arguments that are most central to Amidi’s mode of presen- tation, leaving out only matters that appear somewhat peripheral. The result is an extremely fluent and readable explanation of uszil alfiqh in all of its glorious intricacy. What makes it such a success is that Weiss has arranged6 and then explains the contents of each topic in such a way that specialists and nonspecialists alike will have no trouble in dealing with the material. One might lament the lack of indices and a bibliography, but these are secondary matters and in no way detract from the quality of the work itself and of the lucidity of its exposition. Which brings us to one final point: terminology. No one has done what Weiss has done with the terminology of the classical Islamic discipline of uszil. In line with the dictum that clear thinking must precede clear writing, a precise understanding of terminology is essential to every discipline. In his preface, Weiss writes: “I have been obliged to make a considerable variety of crucial terminological choices: the choices are clearly mine, and they affect the product 6 By way of example, the reader might consider the reasons (p. 81) given by Weiss for changing Amidi’s order in his discussion of fiqh and lughah-related pos- tulates. See also page 121 and elsewhere. Amidi‘s Illkibn is itself an exemplary work from the perspective of its style and order. When I first encountered it on the shelves of the library when I was a student of Hanafi fish charged with making sense of the notoriously abstruse Ijanafi mu!un, I recall thinking to myself how fortunate the Shiifi’iyah were to have such simple texts (like Amidi’s lhkdm and GhazBh’s Mu$- .tusfa) to work with. Of course, at the time, Rllzi’s MuhSllf had not been edited and published, nor had Juwayni’s Burhdn. 582 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11 :4 profoundly."? In his book, examples of every sort abound and, quite honestly, they are a pleasure.s But beyond that, Weiss' efforts in this direction represent a significant breakthrough in that he has provided the foundations for meaningful discourse in the U$iil1 idiom among specialists from different fields. What this means for the Islamization of knowledge discourse, among the fundaments of which is tays'ir al turiith or facilitating access to the intellectual legaq1 of Islam, is not difficult to predict. Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo IIIT Department of Research Herndon, Virginia 7 Preface, p. xx. SParticularly delightful is the author's discussion of Amidi's definition of wujub ... footnote 25, p. 99, in which he gives his own version, adding: "Amidi would probably not have been unhappy with the rephrasing of his Muntaha defini­ tion as al-wujubu .... "