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8. Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur’anic Wisdom (Ḥikma) Became the Sunna of the Prophet
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8 Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur’ānic Wisdom (H . ikma) Became the Sunna of the Prophet Joseph E. Lowry Qur’ānic exegesis appears among the very earliest intellectual tasks undertaken by Muslims, and so one is not surprised to find that commentaries on the Qur’ān survive among the oldest preserved Arabic texts. The spread of Islam brought both the need and the opportunity for explication of the Qur’ān; many persons genuinely needed to know what it meant and others were only too happy to oblige them. Commentaries that survive from the eighth century—the earliest that we have— take a wide focus, supplying the meanings of unusual words, fleshing out the details and contexts of terse narratives, and providing general background information about the Arabian or Judaic or Christian settings in which personalities appear and events unfold. By the early ninth century an increasing tendency toward specialization can be detected in the exegetes’ activities, and qur’ānic exegeses, informed by the achievements of the heroic age of Arabic grammar, increasingly furnish a wide array of linguistic information, both to help with the decoding of Scripture and to confirm the normative status of the language of Scripture.1 Jurists, too, played their part in early qur’ānic exegesis, producing studies of the Qur’ān focused on its narrowly legal aspects, such as its abrogating and abrogated passages (al-nāsikh wa’l-mansūkh), or its legal rulings (ah .kām al-qur’ān), though such works tended to concern themselves with discrete, carefully selected passages rather than provide a running commentary on the text from beginning to end. Because of their narrow focus, these legal texts inhabit—from the point of view of literary genre—the fringes of the tafsı̄r tradition, but for all that they offer a legislative reading of the Qur’ān, they are no less concerned with fundamental problems attending the interpretation of Scripture. It would be fair to say that modern scholarly concern with early qur’ānic 140 Lowry exegesis has focused to a very great extent on the interesting questions of the history of the qur’ānic text, on the reception of Jewish and Christian lore in early Islam, and also on the preservation by early exegetes of details of the early and pre-Islamic history of Arabia. By contrast, the early jurists’ readings of the Qur’ān have, in general, received much less attention,2 though it should be noted that jurists such as Muh . ammad b. Jarı̄r al-T . abarı̄ (d. 311/923) authored some of the most important works belonging to the mainstream tradition of tafsı̄r.3 This essay traces the early history of the juristic exegesis of two terms in the Qur’ān, the pair al-kitāb (‘the book’) and al-h .ikma (‘wisdom’), and in particular how h .ikma came to be glossed as sunna in the sense of the Sunna of the Prophet Muh . ammad.4 This exegesis, which came to underlie a fundamental postulate of Islamic legal hermeneutics, is first attested in the eighth century or slightly later (depending on how one dates sources). The first preserved use of this exegesis as part of a larger argument about legal hermeneutics is found in the Risāla (‘Epistle’) of Muh . ammad b. Idrı̄s al-Shāfi‘ı̄ (d. 204/820), the first preserved comprehensive work on legal theory in Arabic.5 After examining Shāfi‘ı̄’s deployment and elaboration of this idea, this essay will attempt to sketch out the diverse background factors that contributed to the coalescing of this particular exegesis. The analysis will focus on early Muslim texts, especially the earliest Muslim exegetical literature, and also consider a possible rabbinic parallel. The development of this particular exegetical tradition accompanies and mirrors one of the most significant developments in the entire history of Islamic legal hermeneutics: the elevation of traditions from the Prophet Muh . ammad, his legal dicta in effect, to a status equal, or nearly so, to that of the Qur’ān, as revelation. This is the process by which Islamic law’s definitive master rule of recognition emerged.6 Today, and ever since the ninth century, the Qur’ān and traditions from the Prophet are considered, at least in theory, the two fundamental sources of Islamic law. The person usually held responsible for vindicating the view that such traditions, in the form...