An attempt to think through the book.

Continuing 5. Book Thinking from Part-1.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 Background
  • 1.2 Key Actors
    • 1.2.1 The State
    • 1.2.2 The "Secular" Modernist
    • 1.2.3 The Ulama
    • 1.2.4 The Islamist
    • 1.2.5 No Fixed Categories
  • 1.3 Muslim Intellectuals
  • 1.4 Challenges
  • 1.5 Clarification
  • 1.6 Conclusion

1. Introduction

1.1 Background

• Hallaq sets the backdrop of the book through a brief description of what happened to Sharī'a in the past few centuries:
  1. Up until the 19th century (and 1200 years before that), Sharī'a — the moral law of Islam — organically developed by negotiating local customs and practices. It emerged as THE moral+legal force regulating both society and government.
  2. Sharī'a was "paradigmatic" — a central system of norms internalized by both societies and dynastic powers.
  3. It created and maintained a "well-ordered society" (borrowing John Rawls's expression).
  4. However, in the beginning of the 19th century, the two spheres regulated by the Sharī'a:
     • the socioeconomic system; and
     • the political system
       were structurally dismantled at the hands of colonialist Europe.
  5. This eviscerated the Sharī'a and reduced it to only provide raw materials for the legislation of personal status by the modern state.
  6. Even in this limited sphere, Sharī'a lost its autonomy and social agency to the modern state:
     • The modern state derived (and re-created) certain provisions from it to legitimize its own legislative venture that suited modern expediency.
     • Essentially, pick-choose-modify whatever is most convenient.

1.2 Key Actors

To understand the rest of the article, it helps to understand how Hallaq defines the four major actors in the Muslim world today:

1. The State;
2. The "Secular" Modernist;
3. The Ulama; and
4. The Islamist

1.2.1 The State

Hallaq points out that the nation-state in the Islamic world is a modern entity. Governance in Islamic lands had to acquire a modernist structure in order for its nationalist elite to challenge Western colonialism, direct or indirect. In order to accomplish the above task, they had to also deal with ruling their own populations efficiently. However, there is an absurdity:

1. To resist Western political and military hegemony, the State had to adopt modern technology, modern culture, and modern institutions
2. But, the modernization process involved depending for all its major features on a capitalist economy and/or technology. This led to economic and other forms of dependency on one Western country or another.

The absurdity is that to free themselves from the clutches of colonialism (which Hallaq says is a quintessential and inherent feature of modernity), the Muslim states adopted modern institutions and cultures that led them to new colonialist trappings.

1.2.2 The "Secular" Modernist

Hallaq says that a "secular" modernist is someone ranging from an atheist to a believer. Their fundamental attribute is that they are someone who:

• do not wish to see religion play any role in the state, its politics, or the public sphere.

Hallaq notes that the "secular" modernists were a significant camp during the 1940s and 1950s. However, they slowly declined in the next three decades, becoming a relative minority after the early 1990s.

Whatever strength they could garner after that appears to stem from their association with the State (whose tendencies generally are secular, with Saudi Arabia and Iran being the obvious exceptions).

1.2.3 The Ulama

Hallaq defines an Ulama as someone who:

1. continue to uphold their "traditional" hermeneutic. This means they continue to uphold authority of their legal sources, treatises, madhhabic schools, leading jurists, and ways of instruction. However, Hallaq is careful to mention that this does not mean these spheres are an exact replica of actual historical practice.
2. continue to dedicate themselves to religious knowledge, either by acquiring it as students or by imparting it as teachers, professors, muftis, or preachers.
3. mostly functions as educationists, but not as legalists as they did before the 19th century.
4. remain largely disassociated from other technical professions. However, this is not to say that some religious universities as Al-Azhar do not offer programs of study in the sciences.

Hallaq says that the Ulama survived as pockets in various Muslim countries. He lists some of them — South-East Asia, Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt.

Other than Saudi Arabia, where they are a powerful actor in domestic politics and the legal system, in no other Sunnite country has the Iranian experiment of exclusive Ulama rule been replicated.

In Egypt and Pakistan, though the Ulama play some role, they exist at times in tension and at times in accommodation.

1.2.4 The Islamist

Hallaq defines the Islamist by contrasting with the Ulama. An Islamist is someone who:

1. is not trained in the traditional disciplines;
2. do not read the classical sources with the same perspective as the Ulama;
3. are trained in a wide variety of modern technical disciplines (ranging from engineering and medicine to accounting, business, and teaching in "secular" schools);
4. are willing to employ any modern hermeneutical amalgam:
   • Their hermeneutic — which is everything they say, and how and why they say it — is one of complex hybridity.
   • They are not bound by an established or a given reading of the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunna, as the Ulama generally are.
   • Their interpretive techniques of these sources can invoke a wide range of principles from the social or natural sciences (like Muhammad Shahrur).
   • They shed the mantle of traditional juristic and hermeneutical authority.
   • They do not feel bound by the cultural and epistemic systems developed throughout Islamic intellectual and legal history.

Hallaq notes that besides Pakistan's Mawdudi and Egypt's Sayyid Qutb (who attracted significant number of Muslim readers around the world; and a few other secondary writers), most Islamists have not unified under any clearly identified banner or ideology. Thus, their camp is highly diverse.

1.2.5 No Fixed Categories

Hallaq admits that the above four categories are not neatly divided.

• A "Secular" Modernist can range from an atheist to a believer.
• All Islamists are not unified in terms of ideology or methodology.
• Some Ulamas joined the Islamist camp (though not formally).
  • Example: Members of the lower echelons of Egypt's famous al-Azhar.
  • This is attested not only by the political positions they adopt, but also by their hybridized interpretive mechanisms that are no longer loyal to the Azharite juristic hermeneutic.
• Some Islamists have penetrated Azhar's lower ranks and continue to do so.

Thus, the boundaries are never neat, not even on the level of state involvement.

1.3 Muslim Intellectuals

Hallaq laments that Muslims today (even their leading intellectuals) take the modern state for granted. He specifies some of the distortions the thinking has produced:

1. Assuming that modern state existed throughout history and even sanctioned by the Qur'an itself.
2. Considering Nationalism, that is unique to the modern state, to be a timeless phenomenon (in some cases, assumed to be "launched into the world by the Islamic Holy Constitution" drafted in Medina 14 centuries ago.)
3. Viewing the concept of citizenship, democracy, and suffrage to be part of early islamic societies.

Hallaq reflects that even though there are some political scientists and globalization theorists questioning the future of the modern state, modern Islamist thinkers and scholars still take the modern state for granted, considering it to be a timeless phenomenon. Hallaq thinks this is because they reflect the present reality to be indestructible and so powerful that any other alternative is not envisioned. Hence, the tendency for anachronism — reading the present in the
past.

1.4 Challenges

The challenge is to reconcile two contradictory facts:

1. The Ontological Fact of the State and its Undeniably Powerful Presence
2. The Deontological Fact of the Necessity to Bring About a Form of Sharī'a Governance

The challenge is further compounded, Hallaq says, by the fact that states in Muslim countries have not done much to rehabilitate any acceptable form of genuine Sharī'a governance. He cites two examples for this:

1. The constitutional battles of the Islamists in Egypt and Pakistan
2. The failure of Iranian Revolution as an Islamic political and legal project

Yet, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the Ulama, Hallaq says. He also quotes an excerpt from the Muslim Brotherhood as an example, where they argue that the modern nation-state:

Hallaq's book is thus responding to anyone — The State, Modernist, Islamist, Ulama, or anyone else — who thinks that a nation-state is a neutral tool that can be utilized as a means for any end.

He explicitly states that:

1.5 Clarification

Hallaq clarifies that this book should NOT be interpreted as advocating that Islamic law or governance has no place in the world in which we and our children will live. He says that only a dogmatic, narrow, and myopic vision can allow for such an interpretation.

His argument rests on the premise that a creative reformulation of the Sharī'a and Islamic governance is one of the MOST relevant and constructive ways to reshape the modern project (which is in dire need of moral reconstitution).

But to get to the solution, a correct diagnosis of the problem of the "Islamic State" needs to be made. His book — The Impossible State — is diagnosing this problem.

Thus, a robust proposal for such a future reconstruction must await a genuine understanding of the multi-layered contradiction inherent in any concept of "Islamic state".

1.6 Conclusion

Hallaq sees a similarity between the internal moral critiques within Western postmodernity and latent meanings of the modern Muslim call for the establishment of Islamic governance.

Hallaq explicitly says that he assumes a certain body of knowledge without which there wouldn't be much room in expounding his arguments. Thus, he has provided references throughout the book where he assumes the reader to digest the background information as necessary readings.

He cautions us not to see the references as merely a convention of scholarly writing but as essential tools providing the necessary amount of knowledge for each of his arguments to be properly appreciated and assessed.