ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Legal Comparability and Cultural Identity: the Case of Legal Reasoning in Jewish and Islamic Traditions Concluding Reflections: Comparability and Identity ===================================================== … more importantly, to the historian of religion, chasing origins is of doubtful value because locating a “source” tells us next to nothing about why Muslims bothered with it. Rather than asking: Where did it come from?

It is more fruitful to ask: What is it about this question that fascinated Muslim controversialists? And one might also ask: What aspects of Islam itself made this an interesting question? Kevin Reinhart[^76] The above accounts make the case for comparing legal reasoning in Jewish and Islamic laws, and for asserting that the prevailing role of legal reasoning in medieval Rabbinic legal thought should be understood accordingly.

In that regard, our analysis supports the ‘comparative jurisprudence’ thesis according to which a jurisprudential analysis utilizes better understanding of distinct legal praxes. Indeed, by referring to the jurists’ constitutive imagination we comprehend the inherency of the dualistic conceptualization to religious legalism, and the variety of Rabbinic attitudes towards the legitimization of qiyas and its limits.

While Sherira adopts the semantic inventory of the qiyas in preference to the Talmudic typology of judicial errors, Maimonides aims to harmonize the Islamic theory of the qiyas with the Talmudic categories, and consequently reduces the Talmudic distinction ( devar mishnah / shiqul ha-da’at ) to the Islamic one ( nass / qiyas ). By focusing on legal theory we remapped the Rabbinical stances on the use of qiyas .

Against a well-recognized stream of Rabbinical jurists who celebrated the use of qiyas as a significant component of any judgment and lawmaking, Sa’adya limits its relevancy only to rational laws.

Also, in jurisprudential terms, we observed the consistency of a rationalistic worldview and the objection to the qiyas (Sa’adya) and conversely the traditionalist commitment and the embracement of legal reasoning (Sherira).[^77] All this indicates that the above-examined jurists not only were well-acquainted with Islamic jurisprudence, but also represent a comparative consciousness, i.e. awareness of the comparability of both legal systems.