The Role of Non-Arab Converts in the Development of Early Islamic Law

Western scholarship has attached considerable importance to the role played by scholars of non-Arab descent in the formative period of Islamic law and jurisprudence. This view can be challenged. In a sample taken from a biographical collection of important legal scholars compiled in the fifth/eleventh century, "true" Arabs constituted the majority; three quarters of the non-Arab scholars had an eastern background and came from the regions of the former Sassanian empire; and only a few scholars had clearly Christian or Jewish roots. This result lends no support to the assumption that jurists of non-Arab descent brought solutions from their natal legal systems — Roman, Roman provincial and Jewish law — to early Islamic law.