veiled4allah: the ijaza system: control of intellectual property in early Islam

Awhile ago, I posted about copyright and Islamic law. In response to this, Jonathan Edelstein posted about copyright and Jewish law.

For some reason I decided to go off on a tangent in his comments section and started talking about something called the ijaza.

Ijaza is a general Arabic word meaning "diploma" or "certificate". Historically, it had a more specific definition. My main resource for this is Studies in Early Hadith Literature, by M.M. Azami, which contains a wealth of information about the preservation and transmission of Islamic knowledge in the first couple of centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (sAas).

Back in the days before the printing press, books were copied by hand. Obviously, it would be extremely expensive and time-consuming to "mass-produce" any book and this was rarely done. More often, someone who wished to obtain a copy of a book would go to someone who already had a copy of the book and he would learn the book from that person while making his copy.

Azami reports, Since in those days there was no system of copyright, material from any book could be utilized in composing a book or imparting hadiths, but it was againt the literary custom of the period. Every student, before utilizing any verbal or written material, had to obtain it through the proper channel, otherwise it was thought to be forgery or theft of material (p. 204).

That is, in order to make use of the copied material in any public way, whether to cite it in your own work or to teach it, you had to learn it from someone who was authorized to give it to you. This authorization was a chain of authorities from the original author to the present individual. The original author gave certain people permission to copy and teach his work, and these people subsequently gave other people permission to copy and teach it. The paper that recorded this chain of authorities was the ijaza.

When a student went to learn a book from someone, he would want to see their ijaza. If the ijaza didn't check out properly, there was no guarantee that the copy of the book in this person's possession was an accurate and faithful copy of the original.

As Jonathan and I agreed, the ijaza system is not exactly a copyright system but it's not entirely different from one either (the main difference being the lack of royalties, as Jonathan noted in his comments thread, and this seems to be the main way that historians distinguish modern copyright law). It was a way of controlling who could make copies of your work and what uses they could put it to. If you didn't display the proper permission from the original author (by way of the chain of authorities on the ijaza) people would regard you as a forger or thief.

To be precise, the ijaza is a license (another translation of the word), similar to the Creative Commons Licenses in that way, that gives people a permission to copy and transmit that they would not otherwise have. The default is that there is no permission to copy and transmit publicly; the permission must be granted for it to exist. This ban on copying without proper permission may not have had the force of law as modern copyright does, but it had a strong social force behind it and a scholar would not be taken seriously if he didn't follow the rules. Azami's book goes into great detail about this.

It is also interesting to note that according to Azami, the ijaza system had begun developing by about 750 C.E.