The formation of Islamic hermeneutics: how sunni legal theorists imagined a revealed law, by David R. Vishanoff

The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law, by David R. Vishanoff, (American Oriental Series: 93), (New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 2011), xxi + 318 pp., ISBN: 978-0-940490-31-4, $46 (cloth) (First paragraph) The hermeneutical aspects of Islamic legal theory (usÌ£ūl al-fiqh), defined by the author of the present book as "the part of legal theory that focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the language of a scriptural canon" (p. xiii), has in recent decades been subject of a few significant detail studies, but not of any comprehensive systematic treatment. The present book provides a first comprehensive and systematic analysis of the development of Sunnī legal hermeneutics from its origins through the first half of the 5th/11th century, described by the author as "the formative or preclassical period of Islamic legal hermeneutics." The classical period, Vishanoff explains, began "in the second half of the 5th/11th century, which witnessed a sudden proliferation of major works that would become enduring points of reference for the discipline by scholars such as Abū l-Walīd al-Bājī, Abū IshÌ£āq al-Shīrāzī, Abū l-ʿUsr al-Bazdawī, Imām al-HÌ£aramayn al-Juwaynī, al-Sarakhsī, al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿAqīl, and Ibn Barhān" (p. xv).