Unfortunately for Huff [addressing Toby Huff's The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West], his characterization of the major institution of the Islamic world that he considers—the madrasa and Islamic law in general—is deeply flawed. Saliba has already questioned the accuracy of Huff’s observation that the natural sciences were not taught in madrasas is accurate.12 Even more pertinent is the fact that Huff’s portrayal of the nature of Islamic law and its practice in the post-formative period is dated, based as it is on the now-discredited notion that independent legal reasoning ceased in roughly the eleventh century.13 Huff uses the notion that Islamic legal scholars ceased to question the authority of the past at that time to argue, both implicitly and explicitly, that medieval and early modern European scholars were distinguished from their Muslim counterparts by their ability and inclination to view reason and rational inquiry as both desirable and necessary.14 In the following discussion, I argue that such a claim is misleading and ignores a nuanced acceptance of rational inquiry on the part of Muslim scholars in the early modern period.
I have already referred to the ambition of Huff’s book, and it is understandable that any single scholar attempting to offer a synthesis of the literature on science in medieval and early modern Europe, China and Islamdom, may occasionally miss works of importance. However, the sea-change which has taken place during the last three decades of scholarship on Islamic law in the post-formative period (roughly the eleventh to eighteenth centuries) has been profound. If Huff had had the opportunity to familiarize himself with any of the work of Wael Hallaq, Bernard Weiss, Baber Johansen, Sherman Jackson, David Powers, Mohammad Fadel, or Haim Gerber, to name only a few prominent scholars in this field, he would have had to reconsider many of his basic preconceptions regarding Islamic law in the early modern period: that it was conservative and static while simultaneously ignoring legal precedent, that it opposed philosophy, and that its practitioners failed to inquire after higher principles with which they could theorize their study of law.15
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In the following discussion, I will examine the place that natural science (chiefly astronomy and medicine) occupied in three of the most important collections of legal opinions (fatwā, pl. fatāwā) in the Muslim West during the late medieval and early modern periods: the collections of al-Burzulī (d. 841/1438), al-Wansharīsī (d. 914/1508), and al-Wazzānī (d. 1342/1923). Instead of representing editions of the author’s own fatāwā, these collections contain selections from the legal decisions of hundreds of jurists over a substantial period of time. In this way, they offer valuable windows into the nature and variety of legal practice in the Muslim West in the post-formative and early modern periods.17 The following discussion below should be seen as an initial attempt at answering the question of how the natural sciences were perceived in Islamic legal circles in the early modern period.
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As mentioned in the introduction, the scholarship of the past few decades has demonstrated that Islamic law remained dynamic and flexible after the formation of law schools in the fith/eleventh century. This flexibility is well illustrated in the fatwās examined here, with individual jurists drawing creatively on both legal and scientific precedents in order to craft authoritative opinions that reflect both the jurists’ interpretation of the intention of the scriptural sources, and the exigencies of the Muslim community. Yet, while the old stereotypes of Islamic law’s static or arbitrary nature can now be safely discarded, all too often scholars continue to treat developments in legal discourses in isolation, not considering possible relationships of mutual influence with developments in, for example, kalām or Sufism.
