Review of Vishanoff's The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics

168 Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.1 (2014) Ctesias’ World is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Ctesias and his works. Although its twenty-one ine papers do not fully answer the two questions posed by the planners of the conference, they do provide a valuable report on the state of scholarship on issues central to the study of Ctesias. There are, to be sure, signiicant omissions. Two stand out: Our knowledge of Ctesias’ works is iltered through paraphrases and epitomes by various ancient and Byzantine authors, but there is no analysis of the ancient and medieval reception and transmission of Ctesias’ works. Likewise, while Ctesias’ treatment of the early history of Persia and its predecessors is fully discussed, there is no similar discussion of his history of ifth-century B.C.E. Persia, the period for which he is our main authority. Despite these gaps, however, Ctesias’ World will be of interest to all scholars concerned with the Greek sources of ancient Persian history. STANLEY M. BURSTEIN CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law. By DAVID VISHANOFF. American Oriental Series, vol. 93. New Haven: AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 2011. Pp. xxi + 318. $46. According to the second/eighth-century historian Muḥammad Abū Mikhnaf (d. 157/773-4), the fourth caliph ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) once said, “The Quran is recorded script, bound between two covers, and it does not speak. It is only men who give voice to it” (al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, ed. Muḥammad Abū l-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, Dār al-Maʿārif, 1970, 5: 66). The occasion for this statement is said to have been ʿAlī’s confrontation with the Khārijīs, who anathemized him after he agreed to resort to mediation in his conlict with Muʿāwiya. For the Khārijīs, mediation contravened the Quranic verses that reserve the authority of decision-making for God alone (6:57, 12:40, 12:67), and ʿAlī’s sin of submitting to human judgment thus placed him outside the community. In his new book David Vishanof shows that the debate regarding the extent to which revelation speaks for itself rather than through its interpreters blossomed into a sophisticated investigation of the nature of language, communication, and interpretation, particularly in the discipline of legal theory (uṣūl al-iqh). Nearly three decades ago Aron Zysow pointed to the enormous and uncharted intellectual riches contained in the literature of Islamic legal theory (“The Economy of Certainty,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard, 1984). Nevertheless, comprehensive historical accounts of its constitutive ields remain to be written. Vishanof’s book sets out to write such a history of the emergence and development of legal hermeneutic thought. His close reading of hermeneutical debates spanning more than three centuries reveals the remarkable diversity and conceptual detail of this discourse and successfully breaks down and analyzes a number of central questions within it. The book begins with a brief survey of the earliest evidence of hermeneutic thought before turning to its principal subject matter: the hermeneutic theories of inluential Muslim jurists in the second/eighth to ifth/eleventh centuries who decisively shaped the trajectory of the discipline of legal theory as well as of Islamic law as a whole. Vishanof locates the “birth” of legal hermeneutics in the work of al-Shāiʿī (d. 204/820), who formulated the irst coherent hermeneutic theory. From al-Shāiʿī Vishanof moves to the ideas of certain early Muʿtazilīs (whom he terms scripturalists) and of Ẓāhirīs from Dāwūd (d. 270/884) to Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), which were developed in reaction to al-Shāiʿī’s theory. He then lays out the hermeneutic theories of Basran Muʿtazilīs (particularly ʿAbd al-Jabbār, d. 415/1025) and Ashʿarīs (especially al-Bāqillānī, d. 403/1013). The main part of the book ends with a chapter that discusses the thought of Abū Yaʿlā b. al-Farrāʾ (d. 458/1065) and analyzes the relationship of the various Sunni schools of law to these hermeneutic theories, demonstrating that it was theological rather than school ailiations that determined jurists’ hermeneutic approaches. Vishanof has done an enormous amount of spade work: he has mined the extant works on legal theory and the surviving quotations of otherwise lost legal-theoretical works to a degree not seen before. In spite of the complexity of the subject his prose is remarkably readable and uncluttered—although on some occasions I would have wished for key terms to be given in the original Arabic for the sake Reviews of Books 169 of clarity. The sheer number of Muslim legal theorists whom Vishanof treats and classiies is impressive; he introduces or re-introduces several important scholars who, despite their obvious signiicance, have been neglected in recent scholarship. In comparison, Wael Hallaq’s recent six-hundred-page magnum opus on Islamic law (Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations, Cambridge University Press, 2009) fails even to mention three of the ive main thinkers examined by Vishanof (ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Bāqillānī, and Abū Yaʿlā), while a fourth (Ibn Ḥazm) appears only in a single footnote. The erudition that characterizes the main body of the work is shadowed by a developing background argument that inally reveals itself in the conclusion. A hint to this argument is contained in the book’s subtitle, How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law, which could aptly be completed with “that was not there to start with.” Vishanof begins with the premise that Islamic legal theory originated as a project of justifying an existing law by means of revelation. The function of hermeneutics in this process was to reconcile contradictory material in the Quran and the corpus of Hadith reports. In order to achieve this goal legal theorists developed a hermeneutic approach that gave “the interpreter a great deal of control” (p. 105) over the text. The initiator of this movement was al-Shāiʿī, and his ideas inaugurated what Vishanof terms the “law-oriented paradigm” (p. 2). Al-Shāiʿī’s main opponents were theorists who sought to give “the texts of revelation . . . tight control over the results of interpretation” (p. 106), that is, literalists. Vishanof makes an insightful connection between the Ẓāhirīs, who are the paradigmatic literalists of Islamic intellectual history, and Muʿtazilī theologians from Basra, showing that both operated on the assumption that the message of revelation is clear in and of itself and thus that complex hermeneutical techniques, especially extralingual extensions of the text, constitute unnecessary and unacceptable impositions on the divine message. He clearly sympathizes with this view and consistently portrays it as giving rise to the more sophisticated theories of interpretation (e.g., pp. 11, 252). The law-oriented paradigm, by contrast, is “paradoxical,” and “unabashedly” so (p. 191). The paradox, in Vishanof’s view, arises from the fact that the law-oriented approach on the one hand postulates an inherent ambiguity in language and therefore “allows any text [of revelation] to modify any other text” (p. 113), glossing over its internal contradictions, but on the other hand nevertheless attributes the resulting interpretation to God, endowing it with normative authority. For Vishanof, such maneuvers allow jurists to cloak their subjective opinions in divine sanction and thus open the door to “authoritarian exploitation” of revelation (pp. 274–75). The victory of the law-oriented hermeneutic with its authoritarian potential has set the stage for today’s problems, he argues; contra Khaled Abou El Fadl, Vishanof holds that it is not the abandonment of the legal tradition but its success and the concurrent eradication of literalism a millennium ago that is the cause of contemporary religious authoritarianism in Islam. This is a weighty argument that merits more detailed engagement than can be aforded in a brief review. Although I ind Vishanof’s analysis of the individual legal theories that he treats on the whole convincing, I disagree with his overall argument in several respects. I will here concentrate on the three principal problems that I see with his theory. First, Vishanof faults al-Shāiʿī and his law-oriented successors for their determination to reconcile hermeneutically any apparent dissonance between the Quran and Hadith, like “children [who] sometimes exploit the malleability of cardboard to make recalcitrant puzzle pieces it together” (p. 61). But had Hadith been fabricated speciically to serve as props for the post-hoc islamization of pre-existing laws, as he claims elsewhere (pp. 255–56), surely no such hermeneutic maneuvering would have been necessary. Vishanof hedges his bets and leaves open the question how much of classical Islamic law actually goes back to the Prophet, but the answer makes a big diference. If, following Schacht and Crone, one assumes that basically all Hadith are forgeries, then the discipline of Islamic legal theory is nothing but a sham. If some Hadith are authentic while others are not (arguably the most plausible supposition), then al-Shāiʿī’s insistence that all authentic Hadith are authoritative but that their authenticity must irst be ascertained is in fact the most logical method. Vishanof may be convinced that Muḥammad did not proclaim a religious law and that later Muslim jurists constructed this artiicial ediice, but this assertion seems strangely out of place in the conclusion to a book that did not seek to ofer evidence to this efect and indeed dealt primarily with a later period. Second, Vishanof’s sympathy with the literalists, based as it is on a sola scriptura perspective that imagines Muslim jurists facing their sacred texts in the absence of any hermeneutic context, its awkwardly with historical reality, modern hermeneutic theory, and common sense. Historically, we know 170 Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.1 (2014) that the existence of an autonomous, self-regulating Muslim community well before the completion of the Quranic corpus meant that all subsequent readings of the Quran had to take place against the background of existing communal practice that could and did claim its own Islamic normative weight. In contemporary hermeneutics even a cursory glance at analytical philosophy and its discussions of sorites paradoxes and vagueness or at deconstructivist thought reveals a growing awareness of the element of ambiguity that appears to be an ineradicable characteristic of the very make-up of natural languages (but not an insurmountable obstacle to conveying meaning, as demonstrated by the proliic literary output of analytic philosophers and deconstructivists). Muslim literalists found this ambiguity, which was recognized and theorized by al-Shāiʿī, deeply disturbing, but in retrospect their optimistic insistence on letting the texts speak for themselves seems naive. The insights of hermeneutic theorists are conirmed by common sense. Anyone reading this review probably does so in the implicit belief that it expresses my opinions about the book under review, rather than their opposite or my opinions about last year’s weather. Nevertheless, anyone seriously interested in my views on Islamic legal history would want to locate this review in the context of my other writings on the topic, considering that (1) this exposition is both more general and more condensed than, for example, a journal article, so a general statement here may be particularized by more detailed discussions elsewhere; and (2) my views may well have changed over time, and some of them should thus be considered abrogated. It is crucial to note that the proponents of law-oriented hermeneutics stressed that revelation in its communicative dimension functions like natural language, with no magical element of superhuman clarity. It is here that al-Shāiʿī’s often misunderstood emphasis on the Arabicness of the Quran comes into play. Al-Shāiʿī argued that God revealed the Quran in Arabic because He was addressing a community of Arabs in their own language. The tools of understanding revelation are therefore the tools of ordinary comprehension of communication, not a sui generis process that has to be designed from scratch for the single category of divine language. The problem with viewing revelation as a special type of language that possesses the precision of mathematics (an ideal language, as it would be called today) is that it shears such language of much of its subtlety. For example, Vishanof mentions and implicitly accepts the literalist al-Naẓẓām’s (d. 221/836) claims of contradiction between Hadith reports (pp. 73–75), but he does not note al-Shāiʿī’s efective rebuttal. Al-Naẓẓām had raised, inter alia, the case of two apparently conlicting Hadith, one enjoining the protection of women and children and another permitting a nighttime raid on an enemy camp that contained women and children (Josef van Ess, “Ein unbekanntes Fragment des Naẓẓām,” in Der Orient in der Forschung, ed. W. Hoenerbach, Harrassowitz, 1967, pp. 173–74). In contrast, al-Shāiʿī, not unreasonably, used these reports to develop a theory of collateral damage: the targeting of women and children is prohibited, but this prohibition does not extend to every attack that could accidentally kill them (al-Shāiʿī, al-Risāla, ed. Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir, Mụ̣afā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1940, paras. 297f.). The process of harmonization thus lays the basis for subtle legal distinctions and investigation of the precise meaning and boundaries of individual revelatory statements. In comparison, the literalists’ eagerness to identify textual contradictions and to use these to justify the exclusion of texts from the interpretive process appears crude and primarily polemical. My third objection to Vishanof’s argument concerns his discussion of the connection between law-oriented hermeneutics and authoritarianism. The irst schismatic hermeneutic debate preserved in Islamic historiography is the literalist Khārijī claim, mentioned in the beginning of this review, that the Quran speaks for itself. The Khārijīs’ unprecedented rejection of communal deliberation on and understandings of the meaning of revelation was based on the conviction that the “true” message of the Quran could be grasped by any sincere Muslim. Any reading that failed to reach the same meaning thus necessarily implied disbelief. It was this hermeneutic move that made the Khārijīs literally “outsiders” to the main body of Muslims. Vishanof mentions the Khārijī precedent for scriptural literalism (pp. 69–70) but does not draw further parallels to the Muʿtazilīs and Ẓāhirīs whom he discusses later. Yet a central feature of literalist readings of scripture is that they claim to ofer the only way to reach the true meaning of the revealed text; all other interpretations must thus be wrong. From there it is only a short step to asserting that those who arrive at such faulty interpretations are unbelievers (for the Khārijīs) or at least sinful, as the Basran Muʿtazilīs Bishr al-Marīsī (d. 218/833) and Ibrāhīm b. ʿUlayya (d. 218/834) are said to have Reviews of Books 171 held. The absolutism of literalist theology is well illustrated by al-Shāiʿī’s debates with literalist theologians (who, I believe, included the very same al-Marīsī and Ibn ʿUlayya). These debates, preserved in al-Shāiʿī’s treatise Jimāʿ al-ʿilm (in Kitāb al-Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd al-Mụ̣alib, Dār al-Wafāʾ, 2001, 9: 5–55), show clearly that the primary concern—if not obsession—of al-Shāiʿī’s interlocutors was certainty and unanimity of interpretation. Laws must be based on utter certainty regarding the meaning of revelation; this leaves no room for juristic disagreement, which for the literalists is a sure sign of the fallible human element that must be excluded from the process of scriptural interpretation. In response al-Shāiʿī argues that such insistence on certainty and unanimity will inevitably create the same sectarian divisions within law that the literalist approach has spawned within theology. Law, al-Shāiʿī counters, is a realm of probability, which in turn justiies the existence of divergent interpretations and indeed makes it inevitable. Vishanof’s discussion wrongly implies that al-Shāiʿī himself claims certainty for his opinions (e.g., p. 250); the error is based on a misreading of al-Shāiʿī’s claim that divine revelation possesses the quality of “clarity” (bayān), that is, the capacity to convey meaning to its intended audience. Given the fundamental pluralism of the law-oriented approach, it is diicult to see how it could be labeled authoritarian or how literalism could be its remedy. In sum, then, Vishanof’s book makes several invaluable contributions to the study of Islamic thought by providing an extensive and detailed view of Islamic hermeneutic debates over a period of roughly three centuries. As a study of the hermeneutic ideas that emerged from legal and theological debates in Islam, the book ought to be considered one of the benchmarks of the ield; but as an account of the emergence and overall trajectory of Islamic law and legal theory, the hypothesis advanced by Vishanof, while original, is problematic both in substance and in method. AHMED EL SHAMSY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History: The Rashidun Caliphs. By TAYEB EL-HIBRI. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. Pp. xiii + 466. $60. Tayeb El-Hibri is well known to most scholars who work on Islamic historiography through his essential monograph Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, 1999), in which he investigated lucidly the “allusive power” of the historical accounts for the early ʿAbbāsid period. Now he has published another important contribution to the ield; following a similar approach he treats in this volume the period of the so-called rāshidūn caliphs (Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī), and includes a short epilogue on the Umayyad caliphs Muʿāwiya and ʿAbd al-Malik. El-Hibri argues for an “an alternative reading of this history as a largely parabolic cycle of literary narrative” (p. ix) and alleges that all the fragmented accounts (akhbār) found with ʿAbbāsid historians once formed a uniied story with a particular plot line, which he characterizes as an “originally well-structured drama” (p. ix), composed in a close intertextual dialogue with other texts (mostly Quran, sīra, and biblical narratives). According to El-Hibri, all the historical narratives of the late ninth century drew on this earlier parabolic narrative and narrowed the use of history or of historical characters to a “mere factual reporting to support one oicial version or another” (p. ix), i.e., the Shiʿite or Sunni version of the events. This study is a comprehensive, very inspiring, and innovative treatment of each of the rāshidūn biographies—which center on their intertextual connections to other texts and personalities—and delineates convincingly their further functionalization within the Islamic historical master narrative, whether the Shiʿite or Sunni version. As El-Hibri emphasizes, such a critical study of the history of the early caliphs has not yet been undertaken, although there are indeed important precursors, as, for instance, Julius Wellhausen and Albrecht Noth. Several of El-Hibri’s interpretations are particularly convincing: the matching of the pair of Abū Bakr and Muḥammad with that of Hārūn and Moses (p. 65); the identiication of ʿUmar with “Arabness” and of ʿAlī with “Iran” (p. 90f.); ʿUthmān’s depiction as “a prophet in trouble” (pp. 133f.); and the linking of the biography of ʿAlī with several prophetic lives (Saul, David, Moses, John the Baptist, and Muḥammad, pp. 211f.).