Hallaq’s Challenge

Abstract

Wael Hallaq, a leading western scholar of Islamic law, throws down the gauntlet in this daring book, challenging not only Orientalist distortions of Islam but also turning the tables on modernity, the ubiquitous and ineluctable paradigm that informs nearly all thinking, Muslim and non-Muslim, about the Shari‘ah. An Islamic state is impossible, Hallaq contends, not because the Shari‘ah is undesirable, but because the modern state is inherently contradictory to Islam’s metaphysics as well as its historical manifestation as the Shari‘ah. Today’s economic and environmental cataclysms make it urgent, he insists, to recover the moral universe of the Shari‘ah and to do so in conversation with other erstwhile and growing western critiques of modernity.