Intent in Islamic Law : Motive and Meaning in Medieval Sunni

Paul Power’s new book, Intent in Islamic Law, is a challenging and welcome addition to contemporary scholarship on Islamic law and comparative law. Powers examines the way in which the classical Islamic jurists thought about motive, how they thought motive could be identified, and how they thought an actor’s “intent” affected the “legality” of his actions. To accomplish his task, Powers compares the work of several classical jurists from different times, places and different “schools” of Sunni legal thinking. He looks for subtle similarities and differences between the ways in which these different jurists think about motive and in so doing, suggests that it would be very difficult to identify a core set of common concepts and principles that make up a uniform Sunni Islamic theory of intent. This type of comparative study is more commonly found in French or Arabic than in English. It is welcome to see such a sophisticated example of this type