Against Ikhtilāf : Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah in Islamicate context

This article reconsiders Maimonides’ programmatic resistance to Halakhic dissensus and the Mishneh Torah ’s exclusion of dispute by situating these positions within contemporaneous Islamicate discourses. It foregrounds Maimonides’ own stated aims and argues that these commitments are in register with Almohad and Fatimid legal-political projects that theorize the harms of juridical plurality and privilege determinate, uniform rulings. Against this horizon, Maimonides’ posture appears neither anomalous nor merely editorial, but a calibrated response to a widely shared anxiety: that unresolved law fractures communities and dissolves practice into factions. In a closing comparative move, the article suggests that the Fatimid materials do not simply diagnose dissensus; they also intimate a remedy in the consolidation of normativity within a single, univocal work ( Daʿāʾim al-Islām ). Seen thus, the Mishneh Torah may be read as answering the same need through the same instrument: a comprehensive code that aspires to eliminate legal disagreement and secure uniform practice.