Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity

Marion Holmes Katz is a scholar of Islamic law, and this State University of New York Press book is her academic study of how Sunni jurisprudence on ritual purity, ghusl, wudu and tayammum, actually developed historically within the classical legal tradition, tracing the formation of these rules across early Islamic legal literature. Its strength is close historical engagement with the classical fiqh sources themselves, showing purity law as a developed and argued over legal tradition rather than treating it as fixed from the outset. Its limit is that it is a legal historical study of how these rules formed, not a devotional or practical manual of how to perform ritual purification, so a reader wanting guidance on current practice rather than the historical formation of the underlying law needs a different kind of source.