From Kavad to al-Ghazali by Patricia Crone

Author:Patricia Crone [Crone, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781000385533
Google: t9oMEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-20T16:15:59+00:00

That Qurʾānic law should have remained a dead letter until a secondary stage of legal development is a fairly startling proposition, but Burton seems to take it for granted. According to him, the discontinuity between the two arises from the fact that Qurʾānic legislation did not reach the lawyers directly: what they took up was not the book itself, let alone practice based on it, but rather exegetical versions of its contents. Tafsīr generated sunna for the lawyers: thus 5:42-49 generated stories about Muḥammad applying the stoning penalty in cases of adultery, and this sunna won legal recognition, its incompatibility with 24:2 (which specifies flogging) notwithstanding.36 The lawyers did not in Burton’s view pay any serious attention to the text itself until about 800, when they were confronted with Qurʾānic fundamentalists.37

Now this theory could certainly account for the misunderstanding of kitāb in 24:33, provided that we take Burton’s exegetes to have been story-tellers (which is in fact how he seems to envisage them himself).38 The quṣṣāṣ, whose contribution to the exegetical tradition is well attested, were not fussy about the accuracy of their interpretations, and the stories they told in explanation of 24:33 are typical of their approach. Although the verse forms part of a larger unit which must have been composed or, as they saw it, revealed, together they happily assigned different occasions of revelation to the component parts of the verse (not to mention the unit). Thus 33b (“and for those in your possession who desire a kitāb…”) was allegedly revealed about a slave of Ḥuwayṭib b. ʿAbd al-ʿUzzā or Ḥāṭib b. Abī Baltaʿa who wanted a kitāba but whose owner refused to give him one;39 but 33d (“and constrain not your slavegirls to prostitution…”) was supposedly triggered by a slavegirl or slavegirls of ʿAbdallāh b. Ubayy, who had one, two or six, whose names were such-and-such and whom he prostituted, though she/they were unwilling; so she/they went to the Prophet, whereupon this statement was revealed.40 Both claims must be pure fiction. But given this approach, it is not particularly strange that kitāb should have been understood as kitāba: the sheer fact that the word was mentioned in the context of slaves probably sufficed to suggest a manumission document to the quṣṣāṣ, generating instant stories based on this understanding of the word. The stories they told, or some of them, survive in exegetical works of the most reputable kind, and the lawyers never doubted that 24:33 was concerned with manumission: they misunderstood kitāb just as they ignored the flogging penalty (which is prescribed in the same ‘treatise on chastity’), and it could well be that they took their cue from storytelling exegetes in both cases.

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36

Burton, Collection, ch. 4. The argument is restated in his ‘Law and Exegesis: The Penalty for Adultery in Islam’, in G.R. Hawting and A.-K. A. Shareef (eds.), Approaches to the Qurʾān, London and New York 1993.

37

Burton, Collection, pp. 19ff., 161, 177, et passim. Al-Shāfiʿī (d. 822) is presented as the leading opponent of the Qurʾān party’ and the person to whom the sunna owed its rescue (pp.

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