In a richly narrated historical study, Youcef Soufi excavates an Islamic legal culture of critique from the 10th to 13th centuries. Focusing on the practice of munāẓara (disputation), Soufi explores how and why oral debates became a pervasive and revered part of the intellectual legal landscape of Iraq and Persia. Using the life and career of celebrated Iraqi jurist Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, he traces the formalization of debate gatherings at the dawn of the classical legal schools (al-madhāhib) in the early 10th century and analyzes the wider institutional, social, and discursive...