Abdul-Hakim Al-Matroudi: <i>Exonerating the Distinguished Jurists: Ibn Taymiyyah's</i> Rafʿ al-Malām ʿan al-Aʾimma al-Aʿlām <i>in Translation</i> Sheffield: Equinox, 2023. ISBN 978 1 80050 171 3.

The Muslim jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d.728/1328) is well known for his reformist call to return to the Quran, the Sunna of the Prophet, and the interpretations of the earliest Muslims (salaf).He was concerned that the four Sunni schools of law had usurped authority rightly belonging to the original sources of the religion and that assertions of later juristic and communal consensus were too easily wielded against the clear testimony of earlier texts.Whereas the Sunni jurists of Ibn Taymiyya's day sought to stabilize the legal system through conformism (taqld) to the methodologies and precedents of their respective schools, he insisted that the founders of the law schools Ab anfa, Mlik, al-Shfi, and Ibn anbal, relied upon fallible independent reasoning (ijtihd) that was always subject to correction by an earlier text.Despite this, Ibn Taymiyya did not wish to impugn the law schools and their founders entirely.Ijtihd deserved its reward, one reward for the effort and two for getting a ruling correct.Ibn Taymiyya wrote Raf al-malm an al-aimmat al-alm (Exonerating the Distinguished Jurists) to explain diversity within the juristic tradition and exonerate the four Sunni law school founders of wrongdoing when their rulings opposed adth reports.According to Ibn Taymiyya, none of the school founders intentionally opposed a relevant adth.Instead, they may have thought the adth did not actually derive from the Prophet Muammad or that the adth was not relevant to the case at hand.Or perhaps they thought that the adth had been abrogated.In Raf al-malm Ibn Taymiyya details the many ways that jurists might innocently fall into conflicting views, but he also maintains that a adth known to be authentic trumps the views of opposing scholars even if they are very knowledgeable.With this, Ibn Taymiyya gently relativized the legal schools to make space for his own scripturalist approach to religious authority.The book under review reprints the introduction and revises the translation found in Al-Matroudi's article, "The removal of blame from the Great Imms: an annotated translation of Ibn Taymiyyah's Raf al-Malm an al-Aimmat [sic] al-Alm", Islamic Studies 46/3, 2007, 317-80.There is unfortunately no mention of this fact in the book.The introduction underlines Ibn Taymiyya's expertise in adth and highlights his flexibility and tolerance of juristic difference.This emphasis on Ibn Taymiyya's tolerance is appropriate to a point, but it must be balanced with his view that a definitive text holds final authority over all diverging juristic opinions.