Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Dichotomies, Transformations, and Continuities in the Study of Islam
- Islamic Texts: The Anthropologist as Reader
- Textual Aspects of Religious Authority in Premodern Islam
- What to Do with Ritual Texts: Islamic Fiqh Texts and the Study of Islamic Ritual
- Textual Study of Gender
- Scholarship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World: Some Critical Reflections
- Power, Orthodoxy, and Salvation in Classical Islamic Theology
- Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Islam
- “Classical” Islamic Legal Theory as Ideology: Nasr Abu Zayd’s Study of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala
- Islamic Law in the Modern World: States, Laws, and Constitutions
- Vernacular Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition: Sufi Networks, Hospitality, and Translocal Inclusivity
- Middle Eastern Studies and Islam: Oscillations and Tensions in an Old Relationship
- Notes on Contributors
- Overview of NISIS Autumn Schools, 2010-2014
- Index
Islamic Law in the Modern World: States, Laws, and Constitutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Dichotomies, Transformations, and Continuities in the Study of Islam
- Islamic Texts: The Anthropologist as Reader
- Textual Aspects of Religious Authority in Premodern Islam
- What to Do with Ritual Texts: Islamic Fiqh Texts and the Study of Islamic Ritual
- Textual Study of Gender
- Scholarship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World: Some Critical Reflections
- Power, Orthodoxy, and Salvation in Classical Islamic Theology
- Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Islam
- “Classical” Islamic Legal Theory as Ideology: Nasr Abu Zayd’s Study of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala
- Islamic Law in the Modern World: States, Laws, and Constitutions
- Vernacular Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition: Sufi Networks, Hospitality, and Translocal Inclusivity
- Middle Eastern Studies and Islam: Oscillations and Tensions in an Old Relationship
- Notes on Contributors
- Overview of NISIS Autumn Schools, 2010-2014
- Index
Summary
One of the main characteristics of “modernity” in the view of modernisation theorists, is the separation of the world into differentiated spheres like religion, economy, politics, and aesthetics, while the “traditional” world view was holistic, linking these fields so that what is “good” in religion is also “good” or “beautiful” in the other systems (cf. e.g. Kwark 2004, 128-129). The term “Islamic law” would in itself be an example of such a holistic merging of two spheres, conflating a person's faith with his rights, or even three, if “law” is seen as a natural aspect of state politics that in a modern differentiated system should not be separated from religion, in its institutions and its rules.
There are two possible problems with such an approach. One would be, is it true that the “traditional” (premodern) world did not differentiate between these systems? Or is it only an assumption that the modernity sociologists make by constructing “the traditional” as the conceptual opposite of their “modern”? And, following from that, did “modernity” really make such a total and earth-shattering transformation in how Islamic law was practiced in actual reality? Did “modernity” triumph, and what is the relation between religion, the state, and rights today in the Muslim world?
The two topics are thus related: we cannot establish how the “modern transformation” was a break with the past without knowing what that past was. In the practical world of premodern law, there is no doubt that there was a differentiation between the “political institution” – the state, caliph, or sultan – and the “religious institution,” which in Islam was not so much an institution as a category of independent scholars who formulated and discussed the shariʿa rules (Vikør 2005). There were of course areas of contact between the scholars and rulers; many ʿulamaʾ took the sultan’s money to perform functions for him, be it as his advisor or to sit on his council. Indeed the function of qadi was a “state function” – the judge was appointed by the sultan or his representative, and could be fired by him. But in order to become a qadi, a candidate first had to get a scholarly education and be recognised as a learned man, and this did not come from a public appointment, but from his relation to the “civil society” of religious scholarship, the ʿulamaʾ.
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- Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first CenturyTransformations and Continuities, pp. 205 - 222Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017