Hanafitische Jurisprudenz in Asien, 12.-15. Jhdt.

Wider research context: The field of Islamic legal studies has advanced greatly in recent decades, with important work on the development of Islamic law in the early and formative periods, as well as in modern and contemporary contexts. Our understanding of Islamic legal theory has much increased, as has our understanding of legal practice in various historical settings. Long-dominant notions regarding the supposed decadence of the “branches” of the law (furu' al-fiqh) in the post-classical age, however, have led to a relative neglect of the study of substantive doctrine, in terms of structure, function and long-term change. In the ?anafi case, for instance, we are confronted with a considerable black hole in our understanding of the nature and development of positive law, from the 6th/12th to the early 10th/16th centuries. It is this lacuna in the literature that my project for habilitation seeks to address.
Objectives: The aim of this project is to examine a corpus of hitherto unexamined texts of Hanafi furu' al-fiqh from the 6th-9th/12th-15th c., including Tahir b. Ahmad al-Bukhari’s Khulasat al-fatawa, Ibn al-Buldaji al-Mawsili’s Mukhtar al-fatawa, Andarpati’s al-Fatawa al-tatarkhaniyya and Kardari’s al-Fatawa al-bazzaziyya, among others. Through detailed textual analysis of the structure and contents of these works, as well as careful historical contextualization, the project will contribute to more nuanced understandings of the nature and function of furu' al-fiqh in the post-classical age. The aim is to elucidate the concerns of individual authors, as well as the features of a broader discourse, with particular attention paid to the question of casuistry and the creative interplay between various genres of legal writing in the articulation of substantive doctrine.
Approach: The project offers a philologically and historically grounded reading of texts—an approach from the history of ideas that seeks to understand legal thought in its proper social, political and economic context.
Originality: The study’s contribution to the wider field of Islamic legal studies lies in its close examination of the dynamics of legal reasoning within a discrete and hitherto unexamined body of furu' al-fiqh works. In stressing the historical contingency of legal argumentation, the project will moreover counter a certain tendency towards ahistoricism—a phenomenon by which pre-modern fiqh is often situated in a seeming vacuum of “pre-modernity.”
Primary researcher: Katharina Ivanyi, is currently Marie-Jahoda-Fellow at the Institut für Orientalistik of the University of Vienna. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 2012. A revised version of her dissertation on Birgivi’s al-Tariqa al-muhammadiyya appeared with Brill in 2020. The current project is intended as her thesis for habilitation.