Ze?ev Maghen
Three Shafi?ites in Search of Water: The Indulgence of Tayammum and its Rigorous Preconditions
The great turn-of-the-century Hungarian orientalist,
Ignaz Goldziher, found two related aspects of the religion he spent his
life studying especially disagreeable: (1) “the soul-destroying pedantry of the
jurists of Islam” whose “quibbling discriminations” and “dreary exegetical
trifling” proved “detrimental to the inwardness of religion”; and (2) the
inclination among those same “perverters of the law” to “think up contingencies
that will never arise” and entertain “far-fetched legal cases, casuistic
constructs quite independent of the real world” as they indulge in “the boldest
and most reckless flights of fantasy.” Goldziher objected, in short, to
what he saw as the dual plague of hair-splitting and theoretical sophistry
afflicting the classical works of Islamic jurisprudence.
Der Islam, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0021-1818
Volume: 82, 12/2005
Pages: 291 - 348
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