David Vishanoff’s The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics is a significant
contribution to the study of Islamic legal theory and legal hermeneutics. Vishanoff’s
main objective is to examine how Sunni legal hermeneutics became
a systematic and institutional discipline. For this purpose, he strives to restore
the reception and development of al-Shafi‘i’s (d. 820) legal hermeneutics during the pre-classical period (ninth to eleventh centuries). He presents the imam
as the first scholar to have codified an Islamic legal theory and reads him in
light of four hermeneutical models: the Zahiri, Mu‘tazili, Ash‘ari and, what
he calls, a law-oriented model. The book is organized into seven chapters, five
of which are devoted to al-Shafi‘i’s hermeneutics and the four responses to it.
Chapter 1 and 7, respectively, serve as analytic introduction and conclusion.
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences