SHARIAsource

 Volume 2

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 2

Volume 1

Volume 1

In the book Ijhāḍ: Aḥkāmuh wa-ḥudūduh fī al-sharīʿa al-Islāmiya waʾl-qānūn al-waḍʿī [Abortion: Related Islamic Rulings and Limitations in Islamic Law and in Modern Law] Muḥammad Ḥasan al-Nujaymī discusses the regulations and prohibitions surrounding abortion in Islamic law.

Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, a preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the first half of the second century of the Muslim calendar (mid-eighth century CE). Numerous works in different languages have appeared over the past half century to introduce this school of Islamic law and its history, legal theory, and substance in contexts of Shīʿī law.

While previous literature has focused on the current status of the school in its developed and expanded form, this book presents an intellectual history of how the school began. The Jaʿfarī school emerged within the general legal discourse of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, but was known to differ in certain approaches from the other main legal schools of this time. Namely, the Jaʿfarī school expanded the tools for legal interpretation generally and contracts specifically, to a degree unmatched by any of its counterparts in the Muslim legal tradition. In addition to sketching the origins of the school, the book examines Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq’s interpretive approach through detailing his position on a number of specific questions, as well as the legal canons, presumptions, and other interpretive tools he adopted.

This source is part of the Online Companion to Hossein Modarressi, Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law (Harvard University Press, 2022).

In the Introduction to Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law, Hossein Modarressi introduces the topic of his study: the early development of the Jaʿfarī Islamic legal school. Modarressi notes that the Jaʿfarī school emerged in the late Umayyad period (i.e., the first half of the second Islamic century/mid-eighth century CE) and its eponym was Imam Abū ʿAbd Allāh Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), a preeminent jurist of Medina and a revered member of the House of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt). Over the course of the Introduction, Modarressi draws on various sources to show how Imam al-Ṣādiq was revered by many as a leading jurist during his time. Modarressi notes that his project utilizes “all material that corresponds to the language and character of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, as known through both historical and biographical accounts, and as such can reasonably be deemed reliable,” without regard to sectarian tendencies and doctrinal affiliations (p. 11).

This source is part of the Online Companion to Hossein Modarressi, Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law (Harvard University Press, 2022).