Madhhab Madhhab (plural madh hib) is often glossed as a rite or school of Sharī ah law (in the sense of an intellectual of philosophical school). More conceptually, it is a fairly loose social organization whose main function is to regulate the legal interpretation of revelation and to determine the authority of a given interpreter to do so. The word madhhab is derived from the Arabic root dh-h-b (generally associated with walking or following a path) and means a path or course of conduct. More generally, the term is used to denote a doctrine, tenet, or an opinion concerning a certain issue. Moreover, in certain cases the term madhhab may refer to the opinion of leading jurist on a specific issue, but it may also denote—as is more commonly the case—a general hermeneutic approach. The term continues to be used when discussing theological or even mystical schools of thought as well, although particularly after the tenth century the standard use was in the realm of law. The term madhhab usually refers to the legal schools in Sunni Islam— namely to the anafiyah, the Shāfi iyah, the Mālikiyah, and the anbaliyah —as well as to the Ja fariyah (Imami Shiite) and Zaydiyah schools in Shiism. While most modern scholars have stressed the interpretive and legal dimensions of themadhhab, others have drawn attention to its other, social dimensions. As a community, in addition to adherence to a shared hermeneutic method, followers of a certain madhhaboften shared theological views and cultural values that are not strictly speaking “legal,” as well as collective political, social and economic interests—so much so that George Makdisi proposed considering the madhhab, at least from the tenth century onward, more a guild than a school of law, similar to other professional organizations of the Medieval world. Several modern scholars have argued that the schools often functioned as mass movements. Though the schools of law were first and foremost a social organization of jurists, they also had followers who were not necessarily jurists or religious scholars. It is difficult to assess, however, how wide the circles of committed and conscious followers beyond the scholarly circles were, as most of the extant sources were written by and for members of the Sunni scholarly community. Despite certain similarities between the Sunni and the Shi i notion of the madhhab, there are significant differences between the Sunni and the Shi i perceptions of authority and revelation that justify a separate treatment of the Shi i schools. Moreover, the evolution of the Sunni madhhabs is closely intertwined: while followers of the different Sunni madhhabsconsider the followers of the Shi i schools of law heretics (though al-Azhar University recognized the Ja farī school as the sixth accepted madhhab in 1959), they accept the doctrines of the other Sunni schools as legitimate and “orthodox,” despite disputes and disagreements on certain legal issues. Furthermore, since they were all considered orthodox, followers of the schools could (and indeed did) switch schools quite easily. The Formation of the Schools of Law. When the Prophet died, the nascent Muslim community was cut off from its direct access to revelation. For the first time, Muslims were left without legal guidance when they were facing new issues that necessitated legal solution. This problem was even more acute given the rapid expansion of their empire during the first century following Mu ammad’s death. In this new context, Muslims had to derive new rules and laws on the basis of their understanding of, and in accordance with, the revealed message of Islam. To this end, they had to develop interpretive tools and approaches to apply the revelation to rapidly changing circumstances. This also required a clearer definition of what constitutes “revelation”: while a fairly standardized version of the Qur ān was established within a few decades of the Prophet’s death, there were heated debates concerning the status of an extensive body of sayings and deeds that were attributed him ( adīth). These debates continued well into the second and the third Islamic centuries (ninth–tenth centuries C.E.). Additionally, some Muslims believed that the people of certain localities, such as the residents of Medina, preserved the Prophet’s teachings in their habits and mores, while others rejected this view. In any case, the difference in the ways in which Revelation was perceived led to the emergence of various interpretive approaches and, accordingly, to different legal solutions to new cases and problems. Despite this diversity of approaches, certain approaches became more acceptable than others, and, as early as the early eighth century C.E., it is possible to identify fairly systematic approaches to the interpretation of Mu ammad’s message. At the same time, some knowledgeable Muslims ( ulama ; henceforth “jurists”) attracted students and disciples who followed, to varying degrees, their hermeneutic approach. Two of the most prominent approaches to interpreting the revelation and deriving new rules in the first two Islamic centuries were the approach promoted by jurists who came to be known as the “Proponents of Opinion” (Ahl al-Ra y) and that advanced by another group of jurists, the “Proponents of Tradition” (Ahl al- adīth, or “Traditionalists”). These groups were not monolithic, and within each there were multiple opinions and approaches. Moreover, the boundaries between them were not sharply drawn, as many jurists studied with both “Proponents of Opinion” and “Proponents of Tradition.” Despite these subtleties, it is possible to identify some overarching guiding principles that characterized each group. The “Proponents of Opinion” argued for casuistic reasoning as the main tool to derive new legal categories and rules, and at times they tended to favor transmitted reports about the Prophet and his companions that contained general legal maxims over other reports about particular cases and incidents that contradicted these principles. Moreover, they did not subject the traditions on which they relied to rigorous critique, as the “Proponents of Tradition” claimed to have done. This latter group, by contrast, tended to stress the use of transmitted reports about the Prophet’s deeds and saying (as well as about the acts of his companions) in order to establish precedent when deriving new rules. They were also more concerned with establishing the authenticity of the traditions on which they relied. It is precisely on this issue that followers of this approach criticized the “Proponents of Opinion.” In addition, the former complained that deriving new rules on the basis of personal opinion was at odds with the idea of a standardized and fairly stable body of law. Although it is difficult to pinpoint chronologically the exact beginning of the debate between the two groups, it is quite clear that by the late second Islamic century (the late eighth century C.E.) the enmity between partisans of the two approaches was conscious. From the late eighth century, a third approach emerged. Followers of this approach, like Mu ammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfi ī (d. 820), sought to combine the analogical methodology of the “Proponents of Opinion” with the rigorous critique of transmitted reports. Some of these approaches were associated with certain regions or locations: many “Proponents of Opinion,” for example, resided in the garrison towns of Iraq, while many traditionalists operated in the Hijaz (and specifically in Medina). Nevertheless, since scholars and jurists traveled extensively between the learning centers of the Islamic world to study with prominent authorities, the regional association was fairly loose. That said, as already mentioned, at least some jurists who were affiliated with the traditionalist camp, such as Mālik Ibn Anas (d. 795), believed that the inhabitants of Medina preserved in their daily practices and mores the teachings of the Prophet. Among the followers of the different approaches, several jurists gained special prominence and their own following. Since the teachings of many of these jurists have not survived, or have not survived in their entirety, it is often difficult to fully reconstruct their methods. Some of them, such as Mālik, Abū anīfah (d. 767), Abū Yūsuf (d. 798), Mu ammad ibn al- asan al-Shaybānī (d. 805), and Shāfi ī, found themselves associated, sometimes during their lifetime and in other cases in later generations, with a distinctive and identifiable hermeneutic approach. Although it appears that these eminent jurists often built on the teachings of earlier teachers, their followers (especially in later centuries) came to treat them as the eponymous founders of schools of law that bear their names to this day. Many jurists, however, studied with more than one master and did not necessarily identify themselves, and were not recognized by others, as followers of any one school. Moreover, many students followed and applied their teachers’ opinions and teachings selectively and, in many cases, disagreed with and openly challenged their masters. Therefore, in the second and early third Islamic centuries (eighth–early ninth centuries C.E.), it is difficult to identify “schools of law,” similar to those in later centuries. The ninth and tenth centuries C.E. witnessed the emergence of more rigid social structures and practices that enabled fairly standardized initiation, transmission of knowledge and authority, and leadership. These developments mark the emergence of the Islamic school of law as a meaningful social and pedagogical category. Moreover, only when the schools’ structure of authority was established, the leading jurists, who were recognized for their eminence during their lifetime and in the following decades, gained the authoritative status of the eponymous founders of their schools. The emergence of the notion of an eponym did not mean that his opinions/doctrines were fully accepted by the disciples and followers. The eponyms’ teachings, however, constituted a distinctive historical and discursive reference point for their followers. The emergence of the eponymous founders is also related to the growing significance of the authentic adīth traditions in the eighth and ninth centuries C.E. As Christopher Melchert has suggested, the rise of founders of the school took place within the context of the controversy between the “Proponents of Tradition” and their colleagues the “Proponent of Opinion.” As the transmitted adīth tradition became more important as a means to substantiate a legal position, the “Proponents of Opinion” were provoked by the rivals to emphasize the antiquity and authenticity of their arguments and doctrines by assigning them to eminent jurists, such as Abū anīfah and Mālik Ibn Anas. Some of the eminent jurists who were later perceived as founders of a school compiled important texts that served as a repository of their teachings and opinions, such as al-Shāfi ī’s al-Ris lah and his Kit b al-Umm or Mālik’s alMuwaṭṭa . This, however, was not always the case: we do not possess, for example, any substantial work authored by Abū anīfah, the eponym of the anafī school. Although in modern scholarship there has been a debate concerning the authenticity of these texts as they have come down to us, it seems that in all likelihood these compilations, or at least significant portions of them, are indeed authentically the works of their ostensible authors. The centrality these texts gained over the centuries is related to the centrality of the written word in the evolution of the Sunni schools of law in the ninth and tenth centuries C.E.: the school of law was centered on a textual corpus that served as a repository of legal opinions, legal arguments, and doctrines of leading authorities. This corpus was instrumental in organizing and delimiting the schools’ distinctive legal discourses. The origins, formation, and transformation of the Sunni schools of law in the first four Islamic centuries have been hotly debated in modern scholarship. Joseph Schacht explained the emergence of the schools as an evolution that took place in the late eighth/early ninth centuries C.E. from “regional schools,” such as the Kufan school or the school of Medina, to “personal schools,” that is, schools that are based on the following of a leading jurist, such as Mālik or al-Shāfi ī, etc.; the former were justified on the basis of local norms and traditions, whereas the latter were defined by adherence to the teachings of the eponymous founder. According to Schacht, this shift from the “regional” to the “personal” school was a product of the development of legal theories that enabled the systematic derivation of new rules on the basis of textual sources. Wael Hallaq, on the other hand, has argued that neither “regional schools” nor “personal schools” ever existed, because even before the emergence of the so-called personal legal schools, opinions were rarely anonymous; there were disagreements within a given region, and jurists could and did choose what opinion or doctrine to follow. Although certain opinions and legal arguments were associated with specific regions, Hallaq has posited, this association was not different from what one can find in later centuries. Moreover, Hallaq has proposed that a different transformation took place: not from “regional” to “personal schools” but from individual doctrines/opinions to doctrinal schools. According to Hallaq, in the later stage, each school was centered on a legal discourse and doctrine that comprised of the founder’s opinions and legal methodology (which were often attributed to him by the school’s later followers) and the rulings and doctrines of later followers of the school who claimed that their opinions were compatible with those of the eponym. It is noteworthy that doctrinally there was no limitation on the number of schools of law. The formation of the Sunni legal schools thus far described is largely based on the history of the four extant Sunni schools—the anafī, Mālikī, Shāfi ī, and anbalī madhhabs. There were, however, other doctrines, currents, and schools—such as the school of al-Awzā ī (d. 774), the school of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) and the so-called Ẓāhirī school—all of which perished between the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is often difficult to account for the success of certain madhhabs and the failure of others. Modern scholarship has offered several explanations to the failure of the school that did not last to gain a following. Some scholars have emphasized the ability of certain madhhabs to make necessary doctrinal concessions to adapt to new social and political circumstances and to come to terms with the doctrinal challenges of the other schools. These doctrinal concessions included, for example, the willingness to adopt transmitted traditions on the one hand and logical reasoning on the other. Other scholars have stressed the support and patronage of political actors, such as the caliph and the state, as the main reason for the success or failure of a school. It appears, however, that the success or failure of schools of law was much more contingent and rarely can be attributed to a single reason. Moreover, it seems quite likely that the same school failed or succeeded in different parts of the Islamic world for different reasons. Structuring Authority and Continuity. From the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. onward, as the structure of the four Sunni schools of law consolidated both socially and doctrinally, a clearer hierarchy of authorities and opinions within the school emerged. Moreover, much greater efforts were invested in regulating the range of permissible opinions within each school and, perhaps more importantly, in limiting the authority of later followers of the schools to employ independent discretion or reasoning (ijtih d) and new hermeneutic approaches to derive new rules. This does not mean that jurists of later centuries did not employ independent reasoning to solve new problems they encountered, but discursively followers of the schools emphasized their commitment to the doctrines of the founder of their respective schools and their predecessors. Later jurists who were affiliated with a school were expected to derive new rules on the basis of the rulings and doctrines of the respective founder of the school, the hermeneutic principles he laid out, and those developed by his disciples and later authorities within the school. This commitment to these hermeneutic and doctrinal principles is what made a jurist a follower (or an imitator, muqallid—the performer of taqlīd) within a school. This discursive (and to some extent practical) limitation on ijtih d explains the fact that new legal schools did not emerge after the ninth/tenth centuries C.E. From the late tenth/eleventh century C.E. onward), and even more so in the following centuries, all the four Sunni schools of law developed a hierarchy of authorities. This hierarchy of authorities was often reflected in a growing textual body of chronological typologies of the jurists who were affiliated with the different schools. Generally, in most typologies, jurists of later centuries were limited in their authority to exercise independent discretion, although many of them, in practice, did. By establishing a hierarchy of authorities, the schools emerged as a corpus of doctrines and arguments that their followers had to study and memorize. These typologies drew on, and were accompanied by, an extensive biobiblioographical literature (known as the ṭabaq t literature) whose main purpose was to serve as reference works for the schools’ followers, to document the intellectual genealogies of the schools (most commonly starting with the eponym), to map out the schools’ leading authorities, and to reconstruct the pedigree of authoritative opinions and doctrines within the school. The typologies vary in structure and scope; for example, some are quite comprehensive, while other only outline general principles. Moreover, some typologies begin with the higher rank as far as the authority to perform ijtih d is concerned, whereas others start from the perspective of the least qualified follower of the school to employ independent discretion, the foremost muqallid. In any case, the typologies reflect a fairly wide and complex range of juristic activity in terms of the authority to employ independent reasoning, which is not limited to the dichotomy of independent reasoning versus imitation. The utmost mujtahid may derive new rules when he encounters new cases by resorting to the revealed texts. The eponymous founder of the school and often his immediate companions are included in this category. Between the utmost mujtahid and the utmost muqallid there are jurists who are allowed to use limited forms of ijtih d (known as takhrīj) as long as they conform with the hermeneutic principles set by the eponyms and their immediate followers. In most typologies, this form of judicial activity was performed by the jurists who studied with the founder and his disciples, but jurists of this category can be found, albeit to a lesser extent, in later centuries. Later jurists, who usually lived in the tenth and eleventh centuries C.E., were mostly concerned with weeding out weaker and less authoritative opinions and arguments while making other opinions preponderant (hence this activity is termed tarjī , literally meaning to prefer). They did so on the basis of their understanding of their interpretation of the teaching of their predecessors. All the jurists who followed a school, except the founder of the school, performed taqlīd to varying degrees, as they followed hermeneutic and legal principles that already existed. Jurists of later centuries, for the most part, were considered utmostmuqallids, although they, too, practiced at times different forms of takhrīj and tarjī . The nature of the relationship between the ijtih d and taqlīd has attracted a considerable amount of attention in modern scholarship. Several scholars have interpreted the gradual transition to taqlīd as a sign of stagnation and intellectual decline that characterized, in their view, the postformative period of the schools of law. More recent scholarship, however, has pointed to the fact that the rise of taqlīd (or the regime of taqlīd) was instrumental for transmitting, mediating, and regulating authority, and therefore was indispensable for the formation of the legal schools. Moreover, in the words of Mohammad Fadel, the discursive (and practical) transition from ijtih d to taqlīd reflects the “triumph of the ideal of the rule of law,” since it offered a greater degree of predictability and also enabled followers of the schools to supervise the rulings of their peers. As part of the emergence of the school as an authoritative body of opinions and doctrines that followers of the school were to follow and apply, over the centuries the schools developed various legal terms that were intended to explain the position of a legal opinion or argument in relation to the others. Despite some variations in the application of these terms from one school to the other (and despite some differences in the terms used), this terminology was essential for canonizing a fairly stable set of doctrines that constituted the backbone—or the metadiscourse—of the schools’ doctrine. Pointing out what opinions were more authoritative and preponderant within the school was necessary given the often remarkably wide range of opinions within any one school and given the practice of preserving the opinions of past jurists that had fallen from favor or become less authoritative and reliable. The authoritative opinions constituted a body of positive rules, but they also served pedagogical purposes. By mastering these opinions, jurists also learned to master a set of hermeneutic principles that enabled them to derive new rules when they encountered new cases (whether contextually new or quite literally new, such as the appearance of tobacco or foods from the Americas). The pedagogical dimension of the schools’ authoritative opinions was instrumental for preserving the discursive and social coherence of the schools. One of the most important means to codify a backbone of authoritative opinions was the canonization of a textual corpus that served as a repository of these opinions. This corpus comprised of the texts authored by the founders of the schools, their immediate students, and eminent authorities of later centuries. Of particular significance is the emergence of the compendium (or summa; mukhtaṣar) in all four schools during the ninth/tenth centuries C.E. These compendia summarized the most authoritative views of the school (or at least those their authors deemed most authoritative). In addition to the compendium, each school canonized legal works that were considered particularly authoritative. Despite, or perhaps because of, the consolidation of discursive backbones that most followers of the various schools shared, clusters of opinions and doctrines that were associated with particular regions and scholarly circles emerged. In the anafī school, for example, certain legal arguments are attributed to the scholarly circles of tenth- and eleventh-century C.E. Bukhara, Balkh, and Iraq. Likewise, within the Shāfi ī legal school two distinct strands emerged, one in Iraq/Syria and the other in northeastern Iran, until they were merged by influential jurists in the thirteenth century, only to ramify again into Egyptian and Yemeni/Southeast Asian branches. This plurality within the schools resulted in part from the particular characteristics and social settings of the different regions to which a school spread, as well as from the various hermeneutic approaches within the schools that different jurists tended to favor. The Schools of Law and Muslim Sovereigns. Doctrinally, the evolution of the schools of law was not a state-sponsored enterprise; although both the Umayyad and the Abbāsid caliphs extended their patronage to different jurists and religious scholars, they did not play an active doctrinal role in regulating the content of the schools. Furthermore, jurists opposed to the attempt to reduce the plurality of legal schools and opinions within the Sunni community: Mālik, for example, is said to have rejected the proposal of the Abbāsid caliph al-Man ūr (d. 775) to promulgate his al-Muwaṭṭa as the single basis of legal decisions across the empire in part because he saw regional variety as natural and valuable. This is not to say, however, that rulers, sovereigns, and other political actors were insignificant in the promotion and dissemination of the schools in their formative period as well as in later centuries. The Umayyad dynasty (661–750), for instance, supported a wide range of prominent scholars such as the Iraqi Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 778) and the Syrian Abd al-Ra mān al-Awzā ī (d. 774), who, in turn, apparently supported practices that were particularly associated with the dynasty. Most notably, despite disagreements between the two, it seems that these jurists tended to regard the practice of the community as a principal normative source with only limited application of transmitted prophetic traditions. They also showed deference to political actors, such as imams and amirs, granting them broad power to make legal decisions. Additionally, it appears that the two jurists shared many followers, who did not follow other contemporary leading jurists, such as Mālik and Abū anifa. In conjunction with other doctrinal and intellectual challenges, the most significant of with was the rise of an “eponymous founder epistemology” in the third Islamic century, al-Thawrī’s and al-Awzā ī’s association with the Umayyad dynasty led eventually to the demise of their schools in the wake of the Abbāsid revolution of 750. In other instances, such as in ninth-century Egypt, the teachings of al-Shāfi ī found a particularly fertile ground. The gradual decline of the power of Egypt’s Arab aristocracy, who tended to favor the teachings of Mālik, resulted in the rise of a non-Arab Muslim elite, who supported al-Shāfi ī’s critique of Mālik and his legal method. In other cases, while not intervening directly in the content of the law, rulers and sovereigns adopted a school (and sometimes several schools) as the dominant school of their domains. In the Ayyūbid sultanate, for example, it was fairly common that the sultan was a follower of the Shāfi ī school, the most popular school in Egypt at the time. Furthermore, in the Mamluk sultanate, from the reign of Sultan al-Ẓāhir Baybars (d. 1277) onward, the state constituted a legal system in which all four schools were represented and specific cases were directed to judges of different schools, according to the relative advantage of the most common view of the school for the Mamluk ruling elite. Thus, for instance, heresy trials were directed to a Mālikī judge, whose school tended to be less lenient about heresy than the other schools, whereas cases that dealt with the sale of an endowment were brought before a anbalī judge. Over the centuries, jurists presented different opinions concerning the collaboration with the state and had various views as to the ruler’s authority to intervene in the content of the law. Most jurists, like the Egyptian Mālikī Shihāb alDīn al- Qarāfī (d. 1285), tried to prevent, or at least to limit, the intervention of the state in regulating the content of the schools’ teachings and doctrines. Al-Qarāfī, in particular, used the school of law, and especially the notion oftaqlīd, to limit the ruler’s intervention in regulating and manipulating the legal system. On the other hand, the anafī Ibrāhīm b. Alī al-Ṭarasūsī (d. 1356) tried to convince the Mamluk sultan to intervene in determining the content of law that followers of the different schools in his realms were to apply. Al-Ṭarasūsī also tried to convince the sultan that the anafī school served the realm’s interests better than the Shāfi ī madhhab. Similar and additional arguments along these lines can be also found in a treatise compiled by the Egyptian anafī Akmal al-Dīn Mu ammad b. A mad al- Babartī (d. 1384). In the eastern Islamic lands in the post-Mongol period, and particularly from the late fourteenth/early fifteenth centuries C.E., a new perception of the relationship between the state and the school of law emerged. The Mongol invasions into the eastern parts of the Islamic world in the thirteenth century introduced new ideas of law and sovereignty. Generally speaking, according to these new political ideals, the sovereign (that is, the sultan and, more broadly, the ruling dynasty) was the ultimate regulator of the Law, both dynastic and Islamic law. Since most of the post-Mongol Sunni states in that region adopted the anafī school, these new ideas affected this madhhab in particular. Nevertheless, in the long run, these influential and lasting ideas of law and sovereignty apparently affected other schools as well. The Ottoman dynasty, for example, adopted a subschool within the anafī madhhab as its official state school. As opposed to its predecessors (and many of its contemporaries), the dynasty developed a state-sponsored learned hierarchy (or a religious-judicial establishment) that was attached to it. Moreover, as part of the emergence of the hierarchy, the state also appointed jurisconsults (muftis) and supervised the training of the jurists that it appointed to different judicial positions. As a whole, the hierarchy’s authority rested to a considerable extent on its ties with the Ottoman dynasty. Moreover, through this hierarchy, the Ottoman dynasty shaped and regulated the structure of authorities within the anafī school and privileged a corpus of doctrines and opinions out of a wider available range of opinions within the madhhab. To this end, the Ottoman state and its learned hierarchy sponsored the production of a substantial body of intellectual genealogies (ṭabaq t) that were intended to situate the hierarchy within the anafī school of law. In addition, the Ottoman sultans and, from the second half of the sixteenth century, the chief imperial jurisconsult (the şeyhülislâm) regulated the list of jurisprudential texts that members of the hierarchy were to consult in their rulings. Moreover, senior members of the learned hierarchy occasionally preferred to adopt a minority opinion within the anafī school to solve certain legal problems, and this adoption was at times institutionalized by a sultanic edict. The massive involvement of the Ottoman state in regulating the content of the madhhab led to the formation of effective “state schools” of law (or, perhaps, dynastic schools). It should be noted that in parallel to these developments, other jurists across the Islamic world continued to advance the pre-Mongol understanding of the relationship between rulers and the Sunni schools of law. Furthermore, some of these jurists even criticized the attempts made by the different states across the eastern Islamic lands to regulate the content of the school. The early eighteenth-century Damascene anafī jurist Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulsī (d. 1731), for example, argued that the state should not limit the range of applicable opinions within the school, as long as they are all authentic and reliable. Like many of their earlier counterparts, these jurists employed the notions of taqlīd and the school of law to prevent, or at least to reduce, the state’s intervention in regulating the madhhab. The growing intervention of states in regulating the structure of authorities and the schools’ body of opinions and doctrines from the fifteenth century onward, and even more so from the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, is apparently one of the main reasons for the decline of the madhhab as a significant social organization and interpretive discourse in many parts of the Islamic world. Nevertheless, despite the gradual decline of the importance of the madhhab, there are still several examples of state madhhabs in the modern period. In modern Indonesia, for example, serious efforts have been, and are still being, made to create a new, specifically Indonesian madhhab (drawing on but not limited by the locally dominant Shāfi ī madhhab). Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, the Wahhābī has institutionalized the Najdi subschool of the anbalī school of law. Challenging the Boundaries of the School. Switching schools of law was not uncommon in Islamic history, although most jurists argued that it should be done for doctrinal reasons and not in order to promote one’s worldly interests. Nevertheless, rulers and commoners often solicited the opinions of jurists who followed different schools concerning a specific case, with the hope of obtaining an opinion that would suit and support their preferred solution. Many members of the Mamluk ruling elite, to mention one example, despite the fact that they usually followed the anafī school, addressed anbalī judges when they desired to sell endowed property. The boundaries of the schools of law were also occasionally challenged by jurists and religious scholars. Some jurists with ūfī and mystical tendencies, such as the sixteenth-century Egyptian jurist and ūfī Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha rānī (d. 1565), considered all four Sunni madhhabs to be one great body of tradition that the ūfī transcended and could draw on selectively. Others, especially from the seventeenth century onward, permitted the combination of different opinions from different schools (a practice known as talfīq) in order to find what they considered better solutions to new and existing legal problems. This notion was also translated into the legal practice across the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, where many local deputy judges adopted different opinions from different schools of law. Despite the popularity of this practice from the seventeenth century onward, some jurists, such as the aforementioned Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulsī and others, opposed it and sought to preserve the boundaries of the legal schools. The practice of talfīq was particularly prevalent across the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces, although in later centuries it spread to other parts of the Islamic world. It appears that one of the reasons for the rise of the notion and legal practice in that region in that time period is the demise of the Mamluk legal order, in which the state supported more or less equally all four schools of law following the Ottoman conquest of the Arab Middle East. While the Ottoman state adopted a specific branch within the anafī school, followers of other schools found themselves for the first time since the thirteenth century without institutionalized state support. It seems that followers of these schools aimed to preserve their social status and authority within the context of the changing political and legal landscape of the Ottoman Empire. It is possible that some of these followers, even though many were appointed by the state as deputy judges, believed that by employing talfīq they would be more attentive to the needs of their potential constituency and thus secure their loyalty. In any case, by the late nineteenth century, the notion and practice of talfīq became central in the legal thought of several eminent Muslim reformers, such as Mu ammad Abduh (d. 1905) and others, who believed that talfīq could serve to introduce certain changes that would enable the Islamic community to respond to contemporary challenges. 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