This CIK Talk based on Prof. Ahmed El Shamsy’s work The Canonization of Islamic Law tells the story of the birth of classical Islamic law in the eighth and ninth centuries CE. It shows how an oral normative tradition embedded in communal practice was transformed into a systematic legal science defined by hermeneutic analysis of a clearly demarcated scriptural canon. This transformation was inaugurated by the innovative legal theory of Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820 CE), and it took place against the background of a crisis of identity and religious authority in ninth-century Egypt. By tracing the formulation, reception, interpretation, and spread of al-Shāfiʿī's ideas, Dr. El Shamsy demonstrates how the canonization of scripture that lay at the heart of al-Shāfiʿī's theory formed the basis for the emergence of legal hermeneutics, the formation of the Sunni schools of law, and the creation of a shared methodological basis in Muslim thought.

Dr. Ahmed El Shamsy 

Professor Ahmed El Shamsy is Professor of Islamic Thought and the Department Chair at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

El Shamsy’s first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals  in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims.
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El Shamsy teaches courses and supervises student research on all aspects of classical Islamic thought. He is an associated (non-supervising) faculty member at the Divinity School.