LAUSR

There is a cliché that, as with Judaism, law occupies a central position within Islam. Islam possesses primary legal foundations to refer to, with the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad being the main two sources of revelation for the majority Sunni tradition. With the rise of the so-called modern Islamic resurgence to restore sharia, one cannot deny that Islamic law remains a significant foundation for establishing an Islamic identity as a cultural feature, not simply as a positive practice. This rise has also generated interest in Western scholarship, which was often previously wedded to colonial and imperial politics, as several scholars have noted. The Oxford Companion to Islamic Law attempts to provide a comprehensive up-to-date synthesis of the scholarship on Islamic law, with the intention of reflecting a counter-narrative to what the editors perceive to be a ‘colonial’ or ‘orientalist’ scholarship. This claim seems to be another way of proposing a revolution in Islamic legal studies but the result offers a scholarship that fits with modern liberal values. While the handbook has a section on ‘Origins’ (Part III), popularised by the classical discussions of Joseph Schacht among others and renewed by the scholarship of Wael Hallaq, who questioned the validity of earlier claims on the origins of Islamic law, the book starts, not with origins, but with a feminist critique of the discipline as situated in the Western world today. This is followed by a discussion of the location of Islamic law within the history of other Islamic disciplines, such as theology, philosophy and anthropology, and its posture towards understanding conceptual elements that constitute Islamic law and institutions. Parts IV and V provide an extensive and varied discussion on Islamic law and society today, covering various world contexts, as well as case studies in connection with the modern debates. There are clearly some important and very strong contributions in this volume that will aid those who study Islamic law. Notably here one must refer to Robert Gleave’s coverage of Shi’i legal theory and the clear and interesting chapter of Matthew Ingalls on the Mamluk period. While contemporary