Although I've read a couple of articles by Hallaq, this is the first book of his that I've tackled. In part this was because his style seemed a bit daunting, but mostly it was because his books were checked out from the library more often than those of other authors on Islamic law. He is really at the top of his field, and everyone knows it. I had to wait until I was so motivated to read him that I was willing to do battle with other readers for the privilege.

Given the density and precision of the material, I was surprised by how smoothly it read. Hallaq is a clear writer and, unlike many other English-speaking scholars in the field, he writes like a law professor. Many of his peers are historians and religious-studies scholars who wield a confusing array of foreign terms in order to avoid creating false equivalences with Western concepts. Hallaq is sensitive to that concern - for instance, he rejects "analogy" as an appropriate translation of qiyas, arguing that the latter has a much wider scope - but when a concept can be fairly represented in English, he does so. This results in work that would be perfectly comprehensible to law students without a background in Islamic studies.

Although the final section on modern legal developments meshes awkwardly with the rest of the book, I was impressed that Hallaq not only describes these legal theories but also engages in a substantive critique of them. He also demonstrates a thorough familiarity with contemporary Arabic secondary sources, which in my experience is quite rare among Western scholars. This book is a bit exhausting, but it is a work of great scholarship and highly recommended to those with an interest in Islamic law. ( )