Muhammad’s Heirs:

Abstract

Muhammad’s Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, by Jonathan E. Brockopp of Penn State University, begins anecdotally with an encounter with Moroccan students at the “University of Fez-Sais” (apparently the College of Literature, Kulliyat al-Adab). In this encounter the author challenges students’ presumptive trust in the scholastic honesty of classical Muslim scholars, like Qadi Iyad b. Musa (d. 544/1149). Brockopp claims that Qadi Iyad “subtly manipulated” the stories of scholars in order to “fulfill his notion of what a great legal scholar should be” (1). Building on this contention, Brockopp endeavors in Muhammad’s Heirs to “reconstruct the history of Muslim scholars based primarily on documentary sources” (2) and “to imagine Islam without the scholarly institutions that arose only centuries after Muhammad’s death” (3). Biographical works on Muslim scholars give the general impression that religious and scholarly “classes” were immediately known to the pioneer generations and have always been christened as Islam’s indispensable and sole charismatic leadership. Brockopp argues the contrary, namely that for approximately the first two centuries of Islamic history there was no established class or community of scholars with an authoritative voice. Despite being subversive of Muslim scholarly authority, Brockopp’s true goal appears to be an effort to offer a more accurate picture of early Islamic history and the way that the early community organically evolved to see religious scholars as a special class whose authority is to be appealed to by both the governed and governors ...