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5 Islamic L. & Soc'y 283 (1998)
Normal Calder (1950-1998)

handle is hein.journals/islamls5 and id is 287 raw text is: NORMAN CALDER (1950-1998) Norman Calder, Senior Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Manchester, died on February 13, 1998. Though he accepted the terminal nature of his illness, he never resigned himself to it. He continued to read, research and write until the week of his death. His sharp mind and (at times, devastating) wit were not diminished by the increasing frailty of his frame. He put his affairs in order and prepared his remaining academic work for publication. Born in 1950 in Buckie, Scotland, Norman went up to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1969. He was awarded a first in Arabic and Persian in 1972, and then spent four years in the Middle East teaching English. On his return he enrolled as a doctoral student, under the supervision of John Wansbrough at SOAS. His thesis, The Structure of Authority in Imami Shi'i Jurisprudence was, and remains, a remarkable piece of work. It continues to be cited and quoted by scholars of Shi'ism nearly twenty years after its completion. The thesis, and the subsequent articles drawn from it, further established the neglected area of Shii law in the Western academe. His main interest was the relationship between epistemology and authority: he examined how Shici jurists developed a legal theory which protected their role as scholars and their prerogative as interpreters. These themes were developed and expanded in later articles, focusing on such diverse figures as Shafi'i, Sabzawari and Khumayni. In 1980 Norman took up a post in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester. Inspired by conversations and contact with colleagues, his area of research broadened. He once said to me that the study of Islamic Law had grown up too quickly- academics had not developed the close textual skills and sophisticated methodological procedures which had become indispensable in the study of Jewish and Christian texts. We were, he said, still working with limited, and ultimately limiting generalisations. His contribution to the remedy of this deficiency was a series of densely argued and, at times, painstaking textual studies of Islamic legal texts. His later writings were characterised by three connected themes: literary genre, myth, and redaction criticism. Under the first theme, he wrote a number of important studies of the tafsir genre. He continued to develop his view that it is the tradition of scholarship (or the generic constraints) in Islamic Law and Society 5,3 @ Brill, Leiden, 1998

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