Wafi A. Momin (ed.): Texts, Scribes and Transmission: Manuscript Cultures of the Ismaili Communities and Beyond. xv, 481 pp. London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2022.

decisive light on this question. This constitutes an important research agenda for future work on these papyri. The second part of the book delves into the literary sources on the early history of the office. Lists and biographies of early qāḍīs appear relatively late in the literature, but the material they contain displays a remarkable degree of verisimilitude. The judges they depict are neither saints nor villains, and they practise a law that sometimes diverges in significant ways from later accepted legal norms. On the basis of his summary analysis, Tillier concludes that we can reconstruct the existence of and practices of qāḍīs in the first half of the eighth century. He then proceeds to construct an image of the judge from the ground up, in as differentiated a manner as possible, shedding light on such questions as where the judge held court in different cities, how litigants petitioned the court, where they were placed within it, and what other officials served the court under the qāḍī. In the final part of the book, Tillier turns to the question of the “origin” of the office of the qāḍī. Previous studies (such as Tyan’s, or von Grunebaum’s 1939 review of Tyan in JAOS, or the work of Crone and Hallaq on Islamic law in general) have generally posited a particular pre-Islamic source of Islamic institutions. Tillier argues convincingly, first, that our knowledge of late antique law in the Near East is too patchy to allow us to discern exactly the kinds of legal cultures the Arab conquerors inherited and, second, that what we do know suggests that the process was not one of simple adoption but rather of the complex and gradual construction of a unified legal system that included existing elements but integrated them into a novel system with a high degree of homogeneity across the provinces. Tillier’s reading of the literary and documentary evidence is diligent, and his conclusions are restrained, thoughtful, and convincing. They pose a refreshing contrast with more flamboyant and speculative accounts of early legal institutions (such as Jokisch’s in his Islamic Imperial Law and Crone’s in her Roman Provincial Law). Its lack of sensationalism, combined with the fact that it is written in French, has unfortunately limited the impact of the book on the field. The language barrier, at least, has now been to some degree removed by the availability of an open-access online version of the book (at https://books.openedition.org/psorbonne/36105?lang) that yields a decent automatic translation into English – good enough, in my experience, to use in the classroom. Tillier’s work shows what legal history can look like when the sources are considered holistically in their variety. Much has been achieved by Tillier, much more remains to be done in this important area.