The Historiography of Sunni Usul al-Fiqh Page 1 of 25 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 06 November 2017 Abstract and Keywords This article reviews scholarship on the history of Sunni usul al-fiqh—also known as “Islamic jurisprudence,” “legal theory,” “source law,” “legal methodology,” and “proofs of the law” (usul al-fiqh adillatuhu)—during the premodern period. It first considers the emergence of usul al-fiqh from the second AH/eighth CE to the middle of the fourth/tenth centuries, paying attention to debates about when and how jurists began to produce texts dedicated to the exposition of the genre. It highlights scholarly accounts of the gradual shift from early rudimentary discussions on legal methodology to systematic and detailed elaborations in the so-called mature texts of usul al-fiqh. It also explores the relationship between usul al-fiqh and furu‘ before turning to scholarship on usul al-fiqh sources from the late fourth/tenth up until the tenth/sixteenth century. The article concludes by assessing the relevance of the key intellectual debates over usul al-fiqh to legal practice. Keywords: usul al-fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, legal theory, legal methodology, proofs of the law, furu‘, Sunni, legal practice Usul al-fiqh can and has been translated by the cognate terms “Islamic jurisprudence,” “legal theory,” “source law,” and “legal methodology.” A historically common definition of the term among Muslim jurists was “the proofs of the law” (usul al-fiqh adillatuhu), meaning that usul al-fiqh referred to the types of proofs admissible when deriving legal rulings. Thus for these jurists the study or science (‘ilm) of usul al-fiqh was the inquiry into those valid categories of proofs: its purpose was both to explicate these categories as well as to provide arguments for their validity. Importantly, usul al-fiqh was different from furu‘ al-fiqh (substantive law): the former literally meant the roots (usul) of the law (fiqh) and the latter its branches (furu‘), conveying the tree-like image that from usul al-fiqh substantive law developed. By the fourth/tenth century, the production of books dedicated to usul al-fiqh historically became common across Sunni schools of law. As some The Historiography of Sunni Usul al-Fiqh Youcef Soufi The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law Edited by Anver M. Emon and Rumee Ahmed Subject: Law, Comparative Law, History of Law Online Publication Date: Oct 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199679010.013.30 1 2 Oxford Handbooks Online