Wood's "Islamic Legal Revival"

Leonard Wood, an attorney at Vinson & Elkins with a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford University, has published Islamic Legal Revival: Reception of European Law and Transformations in Islamic Legal Thought in Egypt, 1875-1952, with Oxford University Press.

In this meticulously researched volume, Leonard Wood presents his ground breaking history of Islamic revivalist thought in Islamic law. Islamic Legal Revival: Reception of European Law and Transformations in Islamic Legal Thought in Egypt, 1879-1952 brings to life the tumultuous history of colonial interventions in Islamic legal consciousness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells the story of the rapid displacement of local Egyptian and Islamic law by transplanted European codes and details the evolution of resultant movements to revive Islamic law. Islamic legal revivalist movements strove to develop a modern version of Islamic law that could be codified and would replace newly imposed European laws. Wood explains in unparalleled depth and with nuance how cutting-edge trends in European legal scholarship inspired influential revivalists and informed their methods in legal thought.

Timely and provocative, Islamic Legal Revival tells of the rich achievements of legal experts in Egypt who disrupted tradition in Islamic jurisprudence and created new approaches to Islamic law that were distinctively responsive to demands of the contemporary world. The story told bears important implications for understandings of Egyptian history, Islamic legal history, comparative law, and deeply contested and highly transformative interactions between European and Islamic thought.

TOC after the jump.

Introduction
Section I: Origins of Islamic Legal Revivalism
1. The Reception of European Law in Political and Social Context
2. Early Islamic Legal Revivalism and National Complacency
3. The Sharia Bar Association Journal and the Islamic Turn
Section II: European Law and Imperialist Campaigns for Islamic Legal Reform
4. Foreign Interventions in Islamic Law
5. The Long Arms of Legal Thought from Algeria, France, and Germany
6. The Comparativist Program for Islamic Legal Reform
Section III: Transformations in Education and Scholarship
7. Education and Scholarship in Franco-Eygptian and French Law before 1923
8. Education and Scholarship in Islamic Law, 1868-1923
9. The Flourishing of Advanced Studies after 1923
Section IV: New Forms of Islamic Legal Thought
10. The Origins of "General Theory" in Islamic Thought
Epilogue
Conclusion