Monday, November 15, 2010
"What you find as you explore the tweets and blog posts
of the profession's leaders is that the failure of newspapers has brought with it a cognitive failure as well, in which a handful of superstitions have come to obscure what is actually happening in the world. So powerful is our desire to believe in the benevolent divinity of technology that it cancels out our caution, forces us to dismiss doubt as so much simple-minded Luddism. We have trouble grasping that the Internet might not bring only good; that an unparalleled tool for enlightenment and research and transparency might also bring unprecedented down-dumbing; that something that empowers the individual might also wreck the structures that have protected the individual for decades.from "Bright frenetic mills" by Thomas Frank, from the "Easy Chair" of Harper's, December 2010, pg. 13
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/12/0083200
More on tradition via MacIntyre via Asad via Zaman ;)
Yet, while Graham shows how "traditionalism" informs religious authority in Islam, he does not give much attention to the concept of tradition itself. [15] For that, we must turn to the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose conception of tradition, especially as mediated to Islamicists by the anthropologist Talal Asad, offers a potentially fruitful way of approaching and understanding Muslim institutions and discourses in the complexities of their development, change and continuity. [16]
To MacIntyre, tradition is, quite simply, "an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted." [17] Traditions may be more or less successful in asking new questions or satisfactorily answering old ones, in meeting the challenges posed to their adherents and in adapting to change; but what remains key to their constitution as traditions is a history of argument and debate over certain fundamental doctrines in shared languages and styles of discourses. [18]-The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)
by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, pg. 4
Sunday, November 14, 2010
"Maliki versus Shafi'i Law and Jurisprudence
Underscoring the significance and impact of Shaf'i preeminence in Cairo were the standing differences separating Maliki from Shafi'i law and jurisprudence. At bottom, these differences resulted from the asymmetrical development of these two schools following the 2nd/8th century revolution spearheaded by al-Shafi'i. [102] Al-Shafi'i (d. 204/820) had introduced an essentially new, positivist jurisprudence that stood in opposition to what Professor Joseph Schacht has referred to as the "ancient schools of law" of which Malik (d. 179/795) had been a leading advocate. [103] The mainstay of al-Shafi'i approach, was, according to Schacht, his adoption of the thesis of the Traditionalists, who equated the sunnah of the Prophet with the contents of formal hadiths traceable back to the Prophet via an unbroken chain of transmitters (isnad). Malik, meanwhile, had not only taken the normative practice of Medina to be the embodiment of the Prophet's teachings, he also attempted to establish the probative value of individual Prophetic reports by comparing them with Medinese practice, the precedents of the Righteous Calophs or the views of other prominent Companions. Malik also relied on "personal judgement," or ray', on the basis of which he would at times restrict the application of Prophetic reports or even set them aside. According to Umar F. 'Abd Allah, whose Malik's Concept of 'Amal is perhaps the best - certainly the most comprehensive - study on Malik to date, this particular aspect of Malik's methodology was based neither on a hostile nor even a lukewarm attitude towards Prophetic sunnah or hadith. Rather, his attempt was to remove the textual ambiguities from Prophetic reports by using Medinese practice as the semantic backdrop against which to determine their intended scope and application. [104: U.F. 'Abd Allah, Malik's Concept of 'Amal in Light of Maliki Legal Theory (Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 1978), 135ff.]I love how they reference each other, ma sha Allah! =)
-Sherman A. Jackson, Islamic Law and the State: the Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (New York: Brill, 1996), 57.
Word is that Dr. Umar is revising and publishing his dissertation as a book in sha Allah. His dissertation is available on pdf, divided in eight parts here (thanks Yusuf!)
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