In August, we look back at some of our most read essays and roundtable contributions published in the past year that attracted a lot of interest. Each week, we focus on essays and posts that touch on a similar topic relating to Islamic law. This week, we take a look at “Legal language in al-Qaʿnabī’s recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ,” an essay by Ahmed El Shamsy and Raza Baqai and Zainab Hermes, participants in Professor El Shamsy’s seminar.
The essay explores a particular recension of one of the canonical texts of Islamic legal history— ʿAbd Allāh al-Qaʿnabī’s (d. 221/833) recension of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ . More specifically, the authors compare the language used in this particular recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ with other recensions, namely “those of Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā, Abū Muṣʿab al-Zuhrī (d. 242/856), [and] Yaḥyā b. Bukayr (d. 231/845).”
Engaging in an in-depth textual analysis across four recensions of this canonical text, the authors arrive at a number of important findings, including for example that “the differences in legal terminology among the four recensions studied here portray Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ as a book that was well established across the Islamicate world already within its author’s lifetime.” The authors also find that “the differences in the usage of legal terms across recensions complicate the prospect of relying on the semantic differentiation of amr and sunna terms to reconstruct Mālik’s legal reasoning.”
All in all, in this essay, Professor El Shamsy and his co-authors engage in an in-depth and comparative textual analysis across different versions of one of Islamic legal history’s most widely read and circulated texts, all the while acknowledging the need for further research.
Read the full essay, “Legal language in al-Qaʿnabī’s recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ,” here.