From Scholarly Circles to Mass Movements: The Formation of Legal Communities in Islamic Societies

Nimrod Hurvitz takes as his point of departure the fact that Islamic jurists led huge movements named madhahib, which played central roles in Islamic societies, politics, and intellectual discourse for over a millennium. These movements pose an obvious yet unexplored question: How were small groups of jurists transformed into mass movements? Hurvitz's answer focuses on the early Islamic era and on the Hanbali madhhab in what is now Iraq. He argues that if we want to grapple with the formation of such a unique and pivotal institution as the madhhab, we need to look at the intellectual and attitudinal complex that was shared by the Hanbali intellectual elite and their numerous lay followers. In the Hanbali case, this shared worldview was the esteem given to personal piety and a propensity to impose such ideals on all Muslims. As a consequence, Hanbalism adopted a posture of militant social activism that has accompanied it since its inception and up to its twenty-first-century offshoot--Wahhabism. The analytical approach advanced by Hurvitz highlights the interplay between social history and the history of ideas, and thus it encourages us to open new angles from which to study Islamic or other socio-religious movements. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]