By Mahmood Kooria and Eirik Hovden
Islamic law, as it evolved over more than a millennium, appeared messier with the passage of time, even to an informed observer. The number of internal sects, confronting schools, contradictory rules, principles such as "every interpreter is right", and allowances for ever-greater diversity further added to the confusion. However, the need to standardize Islamic law went hand in hand with the proliferation of legal rules, doctrinal schools, and increasing legal pluralities.[1] As in the present, in the past, the teachers, students and judges of Islamic law needed standards. In this month's guest blog essay series, we focus on various phenomena of standardization, in the broadest sense, in the Islamic legal tradition.
Without claiming to go beyond the boundaries of the Qurʾān, the Sunna, or even the early scholars of the legal schools (madhhabs), jurists added a vast number of new rules, which were later justified through interpretative methodologies such as takhrīj and istinbāt (extrapolation). Although such terms had different connotations in each school and in different periods, they all referred to the making of new rules on the basis of existing ones or selecting existing alternative rules within the established framework of the madhhab. All these, in turn, made the number of rules even larger, and new needs for standardization arose, resulting in tarjīḥ (lit. preponderance), taḥṣīl and taṣḥīḥ (lit. correction)—terms for the process of selecting the better rule among acceptable alternatives. The madhhabs remained the main frameworks in which Islamic law was produced. Yet, jurists and authors did also transgress madhhab boundaries to select what they perceived as better solutions for specific issues or contexts.[2] Some jurists accordingly advocated and executed talfīq and takhyīr (combining rules across schools) by adopting opinions from other schools or prioritizing different opinions within the school.[3] The resulting new body of rules that could be legitimately used by actors in education and in court (varying from teachers, students, jurisconsults, judges, litigants and defendants) was now much larger; however, we know less about how new standards arose and who made them.
Such nuances were at the center of a multi-year project that Eirik Hovden led at the University of Bergen in Norway. The project, titled "CanCode: Canonization and Codification of Islamic Legal Texts," brought together several early-career and established specialists of Islamic law to explore how various jurists and institutions in different parts of the Islamic world ventured to standardize Islamic law.
In terms of basic hermeneutic usefulness, canonization and codification are both concepts centered on selection and validation. However, they are also different and produce a helpful contrast to each other: In biblical studies and literary studies, a canon is often seen as a corpus or collection of texts, rules, or other cultural items that can, to a significant degree, include diversity and even internal contradiction.[4] Canons are important for communities, but states and other powerful actors also relate to them, engage with them, and seek to instrumentalize them.[5] In its simplest form, a code is a normative text, a thematic collection of items (or, in the present context, rules) with the feature of brevity and in which diversity is reduced to a coherent standard. The term 'codification' is more value-laden than 'canonization,' as the former is not a purely analytical concept. Many scholars prefer to reserve it for phenomena of actual enforcement, state domination, and modernity. However, we identify brevity and coherence as the primary features of a code, and state (and) enforcement as secondary—a distinction that allows for comparison across the pre-modern/modern divide with respect to the primary features and functions while still acknowledging the historical specificity of the secondary. We employ the term 'codification' here for exploration, hermeneutical purposes, and communication. While we recognize that there are drawbacks to this usage, we see few good alternatives. 'Standardization' is the term that has come closest at hand and it is partly used in some of the blog essays below.
In the CanCode project, we focused our discussions on four empirical areas: the Swahili Coast, Zaydī Yemen, Norway, and Egypt and Israel combined. While individual work groups formed around these areas, project participants also came together under a common workgroup to compare, contrast, and engage with theory. In this context, theory was the thread that bound the project's empirical parts together.
We organized a series of intensive workshops and international conferences with open calls along these areas, and some of their outcomes have already been published as special theme issues in journals such as the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (edited by Eirik Hovden and Christian Mauder). Forthcoming publications will appear in Arabica (accepted) and the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (submitted). Those who are interested in the detailed outcomes of these broader discussions can keep an eye out for these articles.
The following essays in the series represent some of our research. In his essay, Mahmood Kooria explores the standardization efforts of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), a celebrated scholar of the medieval Islamic world whose works in substantive Islamic law are yet to be studied. Kooria observes that Ghazālī's works were part of a long process of codification within the doctrinal school to which he belonged. Yet by utilizing diverse strategies such as titles, semiotics, structures, and direct statements of rules, he not only further standardized the school, but also laid out blueprints for future codifications. One such codification was Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn by the Syrian jurist Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), the focus of Mohamed Aidarus Noor's essay.
Hovden explores the code-like instruction by the Zaydī Imām al-Mutawakkil Ismāʿīl (d. 1087/1676) addressed to the judges of his realm. Zaydī imāms were the ultimate reference in their legal system, but they had a complicated relation to the Zaydī madhhab and its canon of legal works. While many educational texts can have code-like features (e.g., brevity and coherence), in this case the intent of enforcement makes the case especially thought-provoking in relation to how we understand the relation between a ruler and the madhhab.
Noor, who recently successfully defended his doctoral dissertation as part of the project on the canonization of Shāfiʾī texts in East Africa, explores how a thirteenth-century text such as Minhāj al-ṭālibīn attained canonical status along the Swahili coast in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By looking at the pedagogical practices, annotations, commentaries, and marginalia centered around the text, he demonstrates the dynamic intellectual practices that made the text a definitive and authoritative source for Islamic substantive law.
A fourth essay by Monika Lindbekk was originally a part of this series. Her essay shifts focus to modern Egypt to describe how present-day judges combine modern codified law with older canonical jurisprudential texts in the field of Muslim personal status law, while simultaneously introducing new standards such as fixed templates for judgments that circulate informally among judges. This essay is slated for future publication.
[1] Najm al-Din Yousefi, "Islam without Fuqahāʾ: Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and His Perso-Islamic Solution to the Caliphate's Crisis of Legitimacy (70–142 AH/690–760 CE), Iranian Studies 50, no. 1 (2017): 9–44; Joseph E. Lowry, "The First Islamic Legal Theory: Ibn al-Muqaffa' on Interpretation, Authority, and the Structure of the Law," Journal of the American Oriental Society 128 (2008): 25–40; Fadel, Mohammed. "The Social Logic of Taqlīd and the Rise of the Mukhtaṣar." Islamic Law and Society 3, no. 2 (1996): 193–233.
[2] Only the state-appointed judges were required to follow their legal schools in the judgements. See Yossef Rapoport, "Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlid: The Four Chief Qadis Under the Mamluks," Islamic Law and Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 213–16.
[3] Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim, "Talfīq/Takhayyur," in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World: Digital Collection: Oxford University Press, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780197669419.001.0001/acref-9780197669419-e-411.
[4] For an overview of the major discussions on canons in biblical and literary studies vis-a-vis Islamic studies, see Jonathan A.C. Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunnī Ḥadīth Canon (Leiden: Brill, 2007), Chapter 2: "The Study of Canons and Canonization." Note the difference between this usage of the term and Intisar Rabb's discussion of canons with respect to legal maxims. Intisar Rabb, "Interpreting Islamic law through legal canons," in Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law, ed. Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ahmad Atif Ahmad, and Said Fares Hassan (Routledge, 2019).
[5] For an extended discussion on the concepts of canonization and codification, see Eirik Hovden, "Understanding and Framing Change in Islamic Law: Potentials and Possible Pitfalls of the Concepts of Canonisation and Codification," Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 12, no. 3 (2024): 289–313.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Mahmood Kooria & Eirik Hovden, Standardization of Islamic Law, Islamic Law Blog (Aug. 8, 2025), https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/08/07/standardization-of-islamic-law.
Suggested Chicago citation: Mahmood Kooria and Eirik Hovden, "Standardization of Islamic Law," Islamic Law Blog, August 24, 2025, https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/08/07/standardization-of-islamic-law.
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