“Al-Samarqandī’s Third Mas’ala: Juridical Dialectic Governed by the Ādāb al-Baḥth” [uncorrected proofs] (original) (raw)

In Oriens 46.1-2; Special Issue, “Rationalist Disciplines and Postclassical Islamic Legal Theories,” eds. Asad Q. Ahmed and Robert Gleave. This article presents, analyzes, and attempts to explain what is probably the most difficult of three problem-questions (masāʾil) contrived by Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī in the closing section of his Risāla fī Ādāb al-Baḥth. The “third masʾala,” from the science of juridical disagreement (khilāf), argues the Shāfiʿī position for the father’s right to guardianship of compulsion (wilāyat al-ijbār) over the virgin major. And in so doing it offers a sophisticated model of a post-classical juristic dialectic articulated in streamlined modes of objection and response, replete with variant species of dilemmatic syllogisms and reductios, and interwoven with logical-philosophical axioms.