An Introduction to Islamic Law Read Online Free PDF Page B

patronage. The madrasa , on the other hand, was as much, if not more, a financial and a political phenomenon as it was an educational one, and it subjected legal education to increasingly systematic control by rulers. It was established as a charitable trust through the law of WAQF , whereby a mosque would be dedicated to the teaching of law, and the professor and students provided with, among other things, stipends, food, a library and dormitories. While ordinary men and women founded many such madrasa s, these remained limited educational projects usually having no effect or influence beyond the local neighborhood.What gave rise to the complex relationship between law and politics was the important fact that those who founded the largest, most affluent and most prestigious madrasa s were the rulers and their immediate entourage (viziers, commanders, mothers, wives, brothers and daughters). Legal education and the informal circle could not, in other words, escape the effects of political control. An account of the development of pre-modern Muslim education is therefore important not only for its own sake, but also, as we shall later see, for explaining the foundational and dramatic changes that befell Islamic law during the modern period.
    To understand the historical evolution of Islamic legal education, a number of threads must be brought together. First, we must trace the dynamics of the early relationship between the legal scholars and thecaliphate, for in these dynamics lie the seeds of the political elite’s interest in the jurists, judges and their law; second, a brief account of legal education within the circle is in order, for it was this forum of legal scholarship that remained, until the nineteenth century, the most enduring mechanism of transmitting knowledge in Islam; third, we need to describe the rise of the madrasa and its patronage, a line of enquiry that can hardly be separated from the law of waqf , which was in turn vital to the madrasa ’s very establishment; and finally, we will return to the relationship that obtained in pre-modern times between the legal profession and the ruling elite.
     
Law and government in the formative period
     
    During most of the first century of Islam, the main representatives of the law were the proto- qadi s who, to all intents and purposes, were not only government employees and administrators of sorts but also laymen who – despite their experience in adjudication and knowledge of customary law – had no formal legal training of the sort that came to prevail later. Their appointments as qadi s were most often combined with other functions, including posts as provincial secretaries and story-tellers who transmitted biblical stories, Quranic narratives and details from the biography of the Prophet. In these capacities, they functioned as the provincial governor’s assistants, if not – on rare occasions – as governors-cum- qadi s. In the near absence of a class of private, legal specialists at this time, these proto- qadi s constituted the bulk of what may roughly be termed a legal profession, and as such they were an integral part of the ruling class.
    Despite the inseparability of the proto- qadi ’s office from that of government administration, the government in this early period rarely, if ever, interfered in determining what law was applied. The caliphate was by nomeans a distinct or a comprehensive source of law. No edicts regulating law are known to have come down from caliphs; there were no constitutions, and certainly no legal codes of any kind. Even when no class of legal specialists had yet appeared, neither the caliphs nor their viziers or provincial governors made any effort to control or appropriate the sphere of law, which was largely customary and Quranic.
    The legal role of the caliph was one of occasional legislative intervention, coming into play when called for or when special needs arose. But this intervention must be understood to have been