Norman Calder

Norman Calder (born 1950 in Buckie in Scotland , † February 13, 1998 ) was a Scottish historian and Islamic scholar .

Life

In 1969 he went to Wadham College in Oxford. He then went to the Middle East for four years, where he worked as an English teacher. He then went to the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS in London, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of John Wansbrough . In 1980 he went to the University of Manchester for the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. There he worked as a senior lecturer in Arabic until his death. As a student of Wansbrough, Calder belonged to the so-called "revisionist" school of Islamic studies.

research

Calder focused on Islamic law in the early days of Islam. To this end, he analyzed the earliest best-known texts of Islamic law using the historical-critical method , especially literary criticism . He found out that the early texts of Islamic law did not come from one author, but had been edited in a lengthy process. It was only afterwards that the texts were attributed to the authorship of authoritative personalities. Calder put the dating of the texts on the first half of the third century according to the Islamic calendar, i.e. H. Middle of the 9th century according to the Christian era. This means that 200 years had passed before the earliest texts of Islamic law were written. Calder was a representative of the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies .

Works

• Interpretation and Jurisprudence in Medieval Islam (2006), with Jawid Mojaddedi.
• Islamic Jurisprudence in the Classical Era (2014).
• Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature (2012), ed. with Jawid Mojaddedi and Andrew Rippin .

Remarks

1. ^ Obituary in Islamic Law and Society 5,3 (1998) p. 283
2. ^ GR Hawting , Review of: Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence by Norman Calder , in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 59, No. 1 (1996), pp. 139-141