The Search for God's Law

Abstract

When one works in the field of Shari'ah studies, a field widelyperceived as holding little excitement (for those who pursue careers init and for those who don't), one rarely encounters a book that sendsone into the poetic ecstasy of a Keats, for example, on the occasion ofhis first looking into Chapman's Homer. Nonetheless, in any intellectualenterprise there are joys that perhaps only the initiated, so tospeak, may truly share. In fact, in the field of Shari'ah studies, as inmany of the fields related to the study of classical Islamic disciplines,the esoteric delights to be tasted these days are many, particularly inview of the continual stream of carefully edited works from theclassical period ... especially when so many of them were believedlost, eaten by worms in some dreary desert setting or sent tumblingtoward eternity in the bloody waters of the Tigris when Baghdad wasoverrun by Mongol hordes. But, to return to the present, it is certainlynot everyday that something really significant happens in the field. InThe Search for God's Law, that significant something has happened.Less than a decade ago, a distinguished western scholar lamentedin the Journal of the American Oriental Society that "despite the greatinterest shown in U$iil al fiqh by Orientalists throughout the world, nogeneral and systematic work dealing with this most important Islamic ...