Pragmatism in Islamic Law
"In Pragmatism in Islamic Law, Ibrahim presents a detailed history of Sunnī legal pluralism and its utilization to accommodate the changing needs of Muslim societies. Since the formative period of Islamic law, jurists have debated whether it is acceptable for a law to be selected based on its utility, rather than weighing conflicting articulations of the law to determine the most likely expression of the divine will. Virtually unanimous opposition to the utilitarian approach, referred to as 'pragmatic eclecticism,' emerged among early jurists. However, due to a host of changing institutional and socioeconomic transformations, a trend toward the legitimization of pragmatic eclecticism arose in the thirteenth century. Subsequently, the Mamluk authorities institutionalized this pragmatism when Sultan Baybars appointed four chief judges representing the four Sunnī schools in Cairo in 1265 CE. After a brief attempt to reverse Mamluk pluralism by imposing the Ḥanafī school in the sixteenth century, Egypt's new rulers, the Ottomans, embraced this pluralistic pragmatism. In examining over a thousand cases from Ottoman Egyptian courts, Ibrahim traces the internal logic of pragmatic eclecticism under the Ottomans. An array of archival sources documents how Egyptian society's subaltern classes navigated Sunnīlegal pluralism as a tool to avoid more austere legal doctrines. The ensuing portrait challenges the assumption made by many modern historians that the utilitarian approaches adopted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim reformers constituted a clear rupture with early Islamic legal history"--Unedited summary from book cover.
