Joseph Schacht

Joseph Franz Schacht (, 15 March 1902 – 1 August 1969) was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York.

In 1924 he published his Habilitations-Schrift, Das kitab al-hiial fil-fiqh (Buch d. Rechtskniffe) des abū Hātim Mahmūd ibn al-Hasan Al-Qazuīnī, with translation and commentary.

In 1925 he obtained his first academic position at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in Breisgau.

In 1927 he became there a professor extraordinarius, making him the youngest professor in all of Germany, and in 1929 a professor ordinarius of Semitic languages.

In 1932 he was appointed a professor at the University of Königsberg.

But in 1934, without being directly threatened or persecuted, Schacht, as a strong opponent of the Nazi regime, went to Cairo, where he taught until 1939 as a professor.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he happened to be in England, where he offered his services to the British government and worked for the BBC.

Schacht taught at Oxford University from 1946.

In 1947 he became a British citizen.

He was the leading Western scholar on Islamic law, whose Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950) is still considered a centrally important work on the subject.

In 1954 he moved to the Netherlands and taught at the University of Leiden.

In the academic year 1957–1958, he taught at Columbia University, where, in 1959 he became a full professor of Arabic and Islamic studies.

The author of many articles in the first and second editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Schacht also co-edited, with C. E. Bosworth, the second edition of The Legacy of Islam for the Legacy series of Oxford University Press and authored a textbook under the title An Introduction to Islamic Law (1964).

Schacht was born into a Catholic family but, with a zeal for study, became at an early age a student in a Hebrew school.

In Breslau and Leipzig he studied Semitic languages, Greek, and Latin, under professors including Gotthelf Bergsträßer.

He remained at Columbia until his retirement in 1969 as professor emeritus.

One of Schacht's major contributions to the history of early Islam is the recognition that Hadith probably stems from those in whom the different traditions of the past converge, and this convergence Schacht describes as "common link".

This concept was later used productively by many other orientalists.

Schacht argued that Islamic law was not as classical Islamic jurisprudence taught,

Rather the law arose from historical development of three different "sunnas" — bodies of custom, rules and law — operating in parallel during the period of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Unification of Islamic legal thought (so that only one sunnah remained) occurred under the legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i (767-820), when the ahadith of Muhammad became pre-eminent (except for the Quran).

The most important of the schools of Islamic law developed in Kufa in Mesopotamia, according to Schacht's research, and its legal precepts spread to other cities such as Medina.

Beginning around 100 A.H. (720 CE), ahadith of Muhammad "began to be fabricated", forming the Islamic Sunnah as it is known today.

While scholars recognized that many ahadith were false and attempted to weed these out with ʻilm al-ḥadīth, this was in vain as most if not all are inauthentic.

According to Schacht, with the exception of "a few modifications dictated by the Qur'an", the Islamic "Sunna" is the same as the "sunna" of "pre-Mohammed Arabia".

One example of the power of traditional law was that under the caliphate, theft was punished by flogging, even though the Qur'an had prescribed maiming/amputation.

Schacht argues that in part the fabrication of ahadith came from "a literary convention, which found particular favor in Iraq", whereby authors/scholars would put their "own doctrine or work under the aegis of an ancient authority."

The ultimate prestigious "ancient authority" in this context was Muhammad and "around 120 A.H."

scholars in Kufa, "followed in a few years by the Medinese" began falsely ascribing "their new doctrines back to earlier jurists", and over time extended them back to Muhammad.

Schacht also blames the religious fervor of those who "detested" use of Qiyas and Ijma.

Providing suspicious justification for the "Traditionist" fabricators were ahadith such as, "sayings attributed to me which agree with the Qur'an go back to me, whether I actually said them or not."

Though false, the forgeries could also be justified as recognizing the "final legitimacy of what the prophet Muhammad did and said.

As evidence that most ahadith were created after 100 A.H., Schacht notes that:

As a whole, Origins critiques the methods and standards of ḥadīth verification as they were first articulated by Al-Shafi‘i and subsequently developed by his students in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, an early and centrally important stage in the formation of Islamic jurisprudence.

His research builds upon the work of important figures in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century study of Islamic law in Europe, such as Gustav Weil and Ignác Goldziher.

In particular, Schacht advocates a skeptical approach to medieval forms of 'isnād criticism, which he views as fabricated and comprising the greater part of Sunni approaches to verifying Prophetic traditions of a legal nature.

Schacht locates the origins of 'ilm al-ḥadīth in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, a moment in the development of Islamic legal reasoning coinciding with the professionalization of the traditionalist (muḥaddith) and jurist (faqīh) classes in the urban centers of the Middle East.

Schacht credits Imām al-Shāfiʻī, the founder of an eponymous school of Islamic jurisprudence, with "creating" "the essentials" of the theory of fiqh (the system of Islamic jurisprudence), made up of four principles/sources/components mentioned above: the Qurʾān, the ḥadīth of the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions, scholarly consensus (ijmāʿ), analogical reasoning (qiyās).

Because the Quran has relatively few verses pertaining to fiqh, Al-Shafi‘i's system meant that "the great bulk" of the rules of the Islamic law were derived from ahadith.

Schacht states that Shafi'i repeatedly insisted that "nothing" could override the authority of the Prophet, even if it was "attested only by an isolated tradition", and that if a hadith was "well-authenticated" (Ṣaḥīḥ) going back to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, it had "precedence over the opinions of his Companions, their successors, and later authorities".