Religion, Law, and Learning in Classical Islam

This second selection of articles by George Makdisi concentrates on the schools of religious thought and legal learning in the medieval Islamic world and their defence of orthodoxy. The author aims to review and re-assess the implications of the conflict between, first, the rationalist and the traditional theologians (the one accepting the influence of Greek philosophy, the other rejecting it), and then between one of these traditionalist schools - the Hanbali school of law - and Sufi mysticism. One of the most important consequences of the first of these confrontations, he contends, was the emergence of the schools of law as the guardians of the faith and theological orthodoxy.

This second selection of articles by George Makdisi concentrates on the schools of religious thought and legal learning in the medieval Islamic world and their defence of orthodoxy.