Abstract

: Regionalism is a key element in narratives pertaining to the rise of the formal Muslim law schools. It is generally believed that these legal schools were influenced by the customary practices of the prominent urban centers of the early 2nd/8th century. Such assumptions are rooted in the Muslim legal works themselves, which distinguish between the legal views of important regional centers. This article tests the purported regional associations of individual law schools by utilizing traditions pertaining to ritual law to reconstruct the dominant practice of major Muslim cities of the early 2nd/8th century. In the process, it models a method for deriving historical information from newly datable legal source material.