Wael B. Hallaq - An Introduction to Islamic Law

The study of Islamic law can be a forbidding prospect for those entering the field for the first time. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar and practitioner of Islamic law, guides students through the intricacies of the subject in this absorbing introduction. The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of Islamic law in its pre-modern natural habitat. The author expounds on the roles of jurists, who reasoned about the law, and of judges and others who administered justice; on how different legal schools came to be established, and on how a moral law functioned in early Muslim society generally. The second part explains how the law was transformed and ultimately dismantled during the colonial period. As the author demonstrates, this rupture necessitated its reinvention in the twentieth-century world of nation-states. In the final chapters, the author charts recent developments and the struggles of the Islamists to negotiate changes which have seen the law emerge as a primarily textual entity focused on fixed punishments and ritual requirements. The book, which includes a chronology, a glossary of key terms and lists for further reading, will be the first stop for those who wish to understand the fundamentals of Islamic law, its practices and its history.

WAEL B. HALLAQ is James McGill Professor in Islamic Law in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He is a world-renowned scholar whose publications include The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2004), Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2001) and A History of Islamic Legal Theories (Cambridge, 1997).

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

Cambridge University Press 2009

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First published in print format 2009

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One out of five people in our world today belongs to the Islamic faith. Yet we know very little about Muslims, about their culture, their religion, their history. Our bookstores are crowded with titles about Islam, mostly negative and nearly always concerned with Islamic violence. Islamic law, or Sharia, has in particular become an ugly term, as often associated with politics as with the chopping off of hands and the stoning of women. An endless array of popular books have distorted Sharia beyond recognition, confusing its principles and practices in the past with its modern, highly politicized, reincarnations. Considering Sharias historical role as the lifeblood of Islam, we have little hope indeed given these distortions of understanding the history and psychology of as much as one-fifth of the population of the world in which we live.

This book attempts to correct misconceptions about Islamic law, first by giving a brief account of its long history and then by showing that what happened to it during the last two centuries made it what it has become. While, historically, it did its best to distance itself from politics and to remain an example of the rule of law, it has now ironically become a fertile political arena, and little else in terms of law. The book therefore attempts to provide the knowledge needed to explain why any mention of the Sharia provokes distaste and even fear on our part. What brought this about? Was the Sharia as harsh and oppressive as it is now depicted in the media? What were its doctrines and practices in history? How did it function within society and the moral community? Under what conditions did it coexist with the body-politic? How was it colonized and largely dismantled? And, finally, how were its remnants transformed into an oppressive regime, wielded above all by the relatively new nation-state (perhaps the most important factor in Sharias modern transformation)?

In order to explain how Islamic law worked, I begin, in , I turn to legal education, the means by which the juristic class reproduced itself over the centuries. This chapter offers a brief account of the workings of the study circle as well as of the law college, which has now become the infamous madrasa . The college, we will see, provided not only a point of contact between law and politics, but also an effective venue through which the ruling class attempted to create and sustain political and religious legitimacy. Topics covered in this chapter are no doubt important in themselves, but they are also fundamental for understanding nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments where the appropriation of the Sharia by the modern state was made possible through dynastic control of traditional legal education.

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Closing our discussion of the pre-modern history of Islamic law, deals with the so-called Circle of Justice, a long-standing Near Eastern culture of political management that employed the Sharia not only for the purposes of acquiring political legitimacy by the ruler but also for achieving just rule as the ultimate realization of Gods will. Governance according to the Circle of Justice represented one of the highest forms of the rule of law, where the state itself was subject to a law not of its own making (unthinkable in our modern state system).

With , the book moves on to the modern period, not a chronological measure of time so much as a dramatic transformation in the structure of Islamic law. Hence, the modern takes off where and when such transformations occur, in British India, for example, at least half a century earlier than in most other Muslim countries. One of the major themes here is the negative impact brought about by the introduction into the Muslim legal landscape of the modern project of the state, perhaps together with capitalism the most powerful institution and feature of modernity. Thus, this chapter offers a historical narrative of legal colonization in key countries: India, Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Iran and Algeria. The dominant theme throughout this chapter is how the Shari