ABSTRACT
Generic conventions, in legal literature as in court poetry and national epics, shape not only texts but also thought itsel( Like language, they mould, while at the same time reflecting, institutional and ideological assumptions, boundaries, and commitments. The important role played by genre in the transmission of knowledge in the medieval Islamic world may be obvious enough from works in the various sciences themselves, but it is also apparent in medieval scholars' theoretical statements. Ibn Khaldun, for example, dearly equates the genres of scientific works with the sciences or disciplines they describe. Sciences, like the works which detail them, are naturally divided into specific chapters or sections, and those chapters are divided into specific problems or questions. The chapters on ritual purity, prayer, alms, marriage, and manumission in compendia of law, or the chapters on the imamate and the attributes of God in theological works are not just convenient pegs on which to hang material relevant to the study of those fields; they represent the inherent structures of those sciences. To master these chapters and questions is to master the science. To produce a new genre, Ibn Khaldun explains, is to invent a new science, even if its elements formerly existed scattered in works belonging to other genres. If learning is an acquired craft, it stands to reason that the genres through which learning is acquired shape categories and modes of thought. 1
For the study of Islamic law, legal institutions, and intellectual history, one of the most important genres is arguably that of U!ill al-
Jiqh, which, perhaps more than any other, seems to embody the community of interpretation of Muslim theoretical jurists. It was in U!ill al-fiqh manuals devoted to legal theory and methodology that many of the great theoretical battles of Islamic legal history were fought. There, the sacred epistemology of Islam, or at least the jurists'
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version thereof, was expressed, debated, and hammered out. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/ 1209) writes, " ... the most important of sciences for the mujtalzid is that of u~ill al-jiqlz; all other sciences are unimportant in this regard".2 While one may imagine a cadre of jurists, a system of law, and a sophisticated community of legal interpretation existing without the particular genre of u~ill al-jiqh-indeed, the Rabbinic legal tradition would seem to provide such a counterexample, having by and large produced no genre equivalent to
u~ill al-jiqlt--an understanding of the tradition of ~J!ill al-jiqlz manuals is indispensable for an understanding of Islamic legal and intellectual history. Unfortunately, the early history of the genre is shrouded in mystery, primarily because so many works from its formative period, the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, have been lost. The present essay contributes .to the investigation of the ~J!ill aljiqh genre in this sparsely documented period, focusing on a work by Mul)ammad b. Da'ud al-Z:ahiri.
