Social Science Research Council

"The Role of Legal Maxims in the Development of Islamic Law"

My dissertation seeks to shed light on the emergence of the basic institutional structure of Sunni Islamic law by examining the role played by legal maxims—succinctly phrased general legal principles—in the formation of the four orthodox schools of legal thought between the ninth- and eleventh centuries. My research project is framed by the following key hypotheses: (1) the development of legal maxims by medieval Muslim jurists inaugurated a “meta-discourse” of abstract principles underpinning all of Sunni Islamic law; (2) the use of maxims in jurisprudence permitted the transformation of a collection of disparate and occasionally contradictory legal rulings into the structured, internally consistent canon constitutive of each school of law; (3) this harmonization of each school’s juristic output enabled the consolidation of the four schools as stable, authoritative institutions.

To date, legal maxims have received virtually no attention in Western scholarship on Islamic law. Drawing on more than forty previously unstudied manuscript sources located at repositories in Egypt, Turkey, Syria and Ireland, my study will offer the first comprehensive historical overview of the field, begin to uncover the intellectual transformations that drove the evolution of Islamic jurisprudence in this formative period and provide a conceptual vocabulary to enable comparative dialogue between scholars of Islamic law and other major legal traditions.