Encyclopedia of Islamic Law: A Compendium of the Major Schools
This work demonstrates the scope of Islamic law and the range of positions available within it. Many of the topics of Islamic law are collected and organized here, and within each section the author has systematically presented the opinions of the four Sunni schools of law - Shafii, Hanbali, Maliki, and Hanafi - together with the school of the so-called Twelver Shiah, here called the Jafari school after the most important of the latter Imams, Jafar al-Sadiq. The goal has been to point out the obvious, yet often-ignored fact of both the unity and diversity of Islamic legal thought, and specifically that the divergence between the Jafari and the Shafii, Hanbali, Maliki and Hanafi is no greater than that among the Shafii, Hanbali, Maliki and Hanafi schools. --Professor Kevin Reinhart