The Search for God's Law Islamic Jurisprudence in the Writings of Sayf al-Din al-Amidi By Bernard G. Weiss. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992, 745 pp.

Abstract

When one works in the field of Shari'ah studies, a field widely
perceived as holding little excitement (for those who pursue careers in
it and for those who don't), one rarely encounters a book that sends
one into the poetic ecstasy of a Keats, for example, on the occasion of
his first looking into Chapman's Homer. Nonetheless, in any intellectual
enterprise there are joys that perhaps only the initiated, so to
speak, may truly share. In fact, in the field of Shari'ah studies, as in
many of the fields related to the study of classical Islamic disciplines,
the esoteric delights to be tasted these days are many, particularly in
view of the continual stream of carefully edited works from the
classical period ... especially when so many of them were believed
lost, eaten by worms in some dreary desert setting or sent tumbling
toward eternity in the bloody waters of the Tigris when Baghdad was
overrun by Mongol hordes. But, to return to the present, it is certainly
not everyday that something really significant happens in the field. In
The Search for God's Law, that significant something has happened.
Less than a decade ago, a distinguished western scholar lamented
in the Journal of the American Oriental Society that "despite the great
interest shown in U$iil al fiqh by Orientalists throughout the world, no
general and systematic work dealing with this most important Islamic ...