Pragmatism in Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History by Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim (review)

Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim. Pragmatism in Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 320 pp. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-8156-3394-5. Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim’s impressive and rich book Pragmatism in Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History is—and surely will remain in the foreseeable future—the most comprehensive study on tatabbu‘ al-rukhas, talfiq and takhayyur, different manifestations of what Ibrahim calls “pragmatic eclecticism,” from the thirteenth century to the Arab Spring. The book traces the long and gradual process whereby the practice of “pragmatic eclecticism” became increasingly common in Egypt (and, more broadly, in other parts of the Muslim world) as a way of increasing the flexibility of Muslim jurists in the age of taqlid. Although a significant part of Ibrahim’s book deals with the legal history of Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt, it draws on debates and methodologies that are more common in Islamic legal studies than in Ottoman (legal) studies. It is for this reason that Pragmatism in Islamic Law may offer exciting possibilities to reexamine the historiographical assumptions, terminology, and blind spots of each of these fields. Historiographically, the book makes three major contributions. First, and perhaps most importantly, Ibrahim’s study questions the predominant periodization of Islamic legal history by demonstrating that certain discourses and practices that were associated with the legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the practice and concept of talfiq, originated as early as the fourteenth century. Second, the book draws attention to a sizeable body of jurisprudential works, most still unpublished, by jurists who have not received much attention in modern scholarship. Moreover, since many of these books were written by non-Hanafi jurists, Ibrahim’s study is one of the first studies to cast light on the textual production and thought of non-Hanafi jurists in the Ottoman and postOttoman periods (from the sixteenth century onward). It is worth mentioning his fascinating examination of new jurisprudential genres, such as the interschool disagreement (ikhtilaf ) manuals that became fairly popular in that time period. Third, Ibrahim demonstrates how juristic debates were reflected in court records. In so doing, he bridges a historiographical gap between the prescriptive works and the court records, and draws attention to continuity across genres and texts. In addition, Ibrahim makes some very intriguing observations that merit an independent study in their own right: for example, Ibrahim notices that during the Ottoman period, across the four schools of law, jurists tended to invoke the views of later authorities (the muta’akhkhirun) over those of the schools’ earlier authorities, and relates this reliance to the growing acceptance of the practice of tatabbu‘ al-rukhas (pp. 232-33). Book Reviews 427 Ibrahim seems less concerned with historiographical debates among Ottomanists . Therefore, Ottomanists may find some of his terminology somewhat confusing; including his fairly frequent use of the terms “Ottoman” and “Ottoman jurists.” Many of the jurists that Ibrahim identifies as “Ottoman” lived under Ottoman rule, but were not necessarily affiliated with the Ottoman imperial learned hierarchy. As Ibrahim himself argues (p. 162), these jurists, both Hanafis and non-Hanafis, did not always agree with their colleagues who were graduates of Ottoman medreses and held various positions in the empire’s legal system. It would be interesting to examine how affiliation with the learned hierarchy shaped different jurists’ attitudes toward the practice of “pragmatic eclecticism.” It is very possible that the members of the learned hierarchy opposed quite consistently the practices of tatabbu‘ al-rukhas and talfiq. An important element of Ibrahim’s general narrative is the Ottoman attempt to Hanafize Egypt (that is, the attempt to elevate the Hanafi school of law over the other three schools). This reviewer finds the author’s argument that the Ottoman adoption of a specific branch within the Hanafi school (and, prior to that, the Mamluk division of labor between the four schools) contributed to a growing interest among members of the different scholarly circles across the empire’s Arab provinces in the practices of tatabbu‘ al-rukhas and, later, talfiq, convincing. A point that is less clear, however, is the extent...