Ahmad Atif Ahmad

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Religious Studies

Readers of Ghazali's Mustasfa might be surprised to encounter a turn in his discussion of the principle of istishab (here limited to the reasonable presumption that when God's law is silent about an obligation, this obligation doesn't exist) can be exploited to deny the very existence of God. Istishab is the only argument that appears to arise from...

Supplements to the usul continue to be in order. Usul may grow by addressing the limits of siyasa & delineating law-n-economics standards. Here is an example.

A very short note on alghaz and hiyal.

A student of Islamic legal reasoning can only make bad arguments for exclusive access to markets. Islamic law's aversion to monopolist behavior is often underestimated, based on quick (or non-existent) readings of the debates on ihtikar (monopolist trading), tas'ir (price-setting), and bay' al-manafi' (utility sales) in the medieval literature. The...

TWO ARTICLES FROM A 2019 COLLECTION

draft review of Modarressi's book on Ja'far al-Sadiq

Reflections on translation. In Arabic.

Indulge me and imagine the US prison population in a different condition. Imagine that it now roughly mirrors white-black ratios in the whole US population, ie, with about 85 or so percent non black and the remaining 15 percent black. Indulge me further and imagine a prison guard population more or less at that same ratio. The legacy of slave-to-pr...

The years 1353 and 1391 of the hijri calendar marked the death of two Egyptian legal scholars, each with a checkered affinity with Hanafi law. The first date, roughly marking the halfpoint of Islam’s 14th century, was the death year of Shaykh Muhammad Bakhit al-Muti‘i (d. 1353|1935). The second, nine years prior to the Century’s end, was the death-...

Old entries in Arabic on various subjects (for a general encyclopedia)

In 1997, I defended a master's thesis on the review of court decisions in Islamic law, titled isti'naf al-ahkam al-qadai'yya wa naqduha fi al-tashri' al-islami....

Short pieces written for the Oxford International Encyclopedia for Legal History, 2009

Teaching material used at the University of California, including overlapping data with published and unpublished notes, strung together to encourage students to inquire into the limits of comparative studies.

An upcoming lecture, Georgetown University, Feb 10, 2022

Ahmad Atif Ahmad of UCSB, Samy Ayoub of UT Austin, Nesrine Badawi of the American University in Cairo, Mohammad Fadel of the UToronto Law School, Sherman Jackson of the University of Southern California, Negar Katirai of the James Roger (Arizona) Law School, Muhammad al-Marakeby of Edinburgh University & al-Azhar, Cairo, Sergio Puig of the James Ro...

Usul al-Fiqh is an art and a set of method-statements, constitutionally unfree of entanglements with other fields of epistemology that struggled with several principles of 'uncertainty.' It remains foundational to understanding human 'sources of judgment' (at the broad end) and more narrowly the sources of human judgments on action.

spur of the moment notes ...

A book review.

In Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan Shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) al-Mabsūṭ, it is taken for granted that different nations (Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims) may live inside a single moral-legal structure known as an abode (dār, pl. dūr). When a community of nations is governed by Islamic moral and legal norms, theirs would be known as the Islam-abode, Dār a...

A call for papers by the Institute for Epistemological Studies in Europe stimulated me to write an essay on the relationship among history, lawmaking, and jurisprudence in the Islamic traditions.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's al-Mustasfa (the Distilled) is a classic in Islamic theoretical jurisprudence. But are there good philosophical reasons to read it today? Well, it is an excellent exposition of the field of Islamic legal philosophy, and it represents a certain slant within its medieval practitioners, which, even nine centuries subsequent to i...

To myself I seem someone who just woke up to meet an intellectual great grandfather, whose work I took for granted yet never cared to investigate. The man's name is thrown in many tomes, those written by scholars of the man's school of law and theology as well as in tomes written by scholars of opposite persuasion. If M. I. Shafi'i (d. 204/820) was...

Does anyone read Arabic? This one is a rumination on the possibility of a new systematic inquiry of the relationship between social and legal norms in modern Arab and Muslim societies, on the one hand, and a populations sense of what they are consenting to and what constitutes established 'customs' for them, on the other.

In case anyone has feedback.

The significance of al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) in Islamic intellectual history cannot be disputed, but his influence on the Sunnī juristic discourse on apostasy may be exaggerated. Ghazālī’s contribution to the Sunnī juristic discourse on apostasy includes a trilogy: first, an attack on the philosophers known as Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Incoherence of th...

Introducing undergraduate students to Islamic law, this accessible textbook does not presume legal or technical knowledge. Drawing on a comparative approach, it encourages students to think through the issues of the application of Islamic law where Muslims live as a majority and where they live as a minority, including the USA, Saudia Arabia, Egypt...

Pitfalls of Scholarship offers an array of reflections on higher education, its entanglements with humanity's pursuit of natural and social knowledge, and the impact national environments have upon it. This book considers the humanities, vocational, and scientific/technological sides of the university from the vantage-point of an Islamic studies sc...

One may believe (with the Mu‘tazila) that the human intellect is capable, independently of divine revelation, of arriving at norms by which individuals may live and for which they may expect divine reward and punishment. Alternatively, one may argue (with the Ash‘ariyya) that the human intellect’s job is to receive the divine revelation and it is i...

The fourth Islamic century (roughly the tenth of the Common Era) opened with scattered arguments about the destiny of the Shari‘a. By the end of the fifth century (eleventh ce), three distinct positions on the subject have been formed. These same three positions will dominate the debate until its virtual end (in its traditional phase) in the 1250/1...

This elastic term ijtihad has pushed both Sunni jurists and historians of Sunni jurisprudence to the point of exhaustion. The more you consider it, and the longer you investigate how both participants in jurisprudence and its observers have understood its ranks and functions, the more elusive it seems to become. Ijtihad denotes a capacity to exert...

In a treatise known as al-Furqan bayna al-Haqqi wa a l-Batil, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) attempted to produce a sketch of the history of heresy, starting with the Kharijis’ excessive labeling of most Muslims as non-Muslims, passing by Shi‘i reconsideration of the status of the Prophet Muhammad’s two companions (Abu Bakr and ‘Umar), and the Qadari (...

During the past two decades I lived in environments very different in their relationship to Shari‘a norms. I have, one could say, inhabited different worlds of relating to these norms, all sharing the same historical moment (i.e., our present time) while being virtually separate worlds, and in these worlds, observers who engaged in an assessment of...

In a dramatic depiction of the changes that took place in Egypt between 1860 and 1900, Muhammad al-Muwilhi imagined a conversation between a deceased pasha who had stood at the helm of the Ministry of War during the first half of the nineteenth century and a character like Muwilhi himself, living at the end of the nineteenth century, who speaks for...

Had the Shafi‘i jurist and Ash‘ari theologian Abu al-Ma‘ali al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085) not engaged Abu al-Qasim al-Ka‘bi’s (d. 319/931) denial of the fatigue of the Shari‘a (or the fatigue of all divine shara‘i‘), we might well have found ourselves addressing different debates on the issue. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the debates would...

“Complex systems are not made ex nihilum.”1 As one such system, the Shari‘a, whose vigor or fatigue has been repeatedly debated, must be seen in terms too complex to be ruled functional or otherwise as if it were one simple unit. Since its infancy, the Shari‘a appeared a puzzling entity, and it has certainly continued to be a complex reality ever s...

Is government part of the Shari‘a, or part of the faith itself, or is it only a practical need for all societies, Muslim societies included? If you take the Ash‘ari view, establishing a government and what it should look like are questions of practical nature, not in any way foundational to the faith. The only justification for discussing governmen...

The language of this recent discussion of the status of the Shari‘a in today’s world was influenced by the times that made the discussion itself possible. One of the factors that condition the current debate is that it takes for granted an assumption that should and will itself likely be debated anew. Many scholars of Islam are increasingly more co...

The conditions created by the reform story I sketched in chapter seven continue to be debated. Hallaq’s reading of the nature and results of this reform introduces the idea of the death of the Shari‘a as a result of epistemic, social, and institutional discontinuity—attested in many aspects of Muslim life today. I have both partial approval of (and...

This book offers a better insight into the comparison of Western and Islamic cultures, with studies that address the issues of Islam and modernity, violence in Islamic law and history, and respect for individuals' privacy in Islamic cultures.

Two apparently contradictory ideas about the relationship between Western modernity and the Muslim world have been put forth, developed, and debated. The first is the idea that no part of the world, including the Muslim world, has escaped Western influence in the past few centuries. The second is the idea that Islam and the West somehow essentially...

It seems self-evident that modern muslim societies are both the theater of Muslim life and an essential depository of the legacy of Islam. Yet, whether social customs in these societies are considered a source of Islamic norms from the standpoint of Islamic law may be questioned. This is an unsettling anomaly, one whose investigation can supply cru...

Many treatments of the subject of apostasy in Islamic law and history possess the monotonous tone of condemnng Islamic law and politics as a unique depository of intolerance against dissidents. This is often complicated by another simpleminded perception of the Islamic legal tradition as a static body of literature that maintained an unusual measur...

To be able to judge the extent to which the individuals in a given society enjoy a good measure of privacy, one has to thoroughly analyze many aspects of social life in that society. One may choose to confine oneself to an inquiry into the extent to which the law governing that society protects the privacy of its individuals. In this case, one must...

The short life of muhammad amin ibn ‘abidin of Damascus (fifty-two years) falls in an important historical moment, at once a moment of continuity and a moment lying on the cusp of change. It was a moment of culmination in a tradition of law that took shape in Syria and Egypt during the Mamluk and Ottoman centuries—from the thirteenth to the ninetee...

The claim that a form of incommensurability between Islamic and Western values is destined to lead Western and Muslim societies to clash conveniently conceals the complex causes of clashes involving Western societies today. The question of modern Western societies’ constant clashes with non-Western societies has been treated by different writers, a...

The theory, the author maintains, stands on a correct reading of authoritative texts and early Muslim history