Description:
In her monograph Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law, Patricia Crone argues that provincial legal practice in Syria, the capital of the nascent Islamic state, influenced the Sharȋʿa no less than did Roman law. She takes as an example of such influence the institution of the patronate (walâʾ) and attempts to prove that its crucial features derive from provincial and Roman law, rather than from pre-Islamic Arab society. The present article examines the author's assumptions and evidence as well as the methodology she adopts to establish her thesis.