Shari’a in the Modern Era

Abstract

Iyad Zahalka’s commendable Shari’a in the Modern Era: Muslim Minorities Jurisprudence gives researchers and legal practitioners an overview of the emerging fiqh al-aqalliyyāt (the jurisprudence of minorities) discipline. In fact, at the time of its publication several other books were published on this subject, among them Uriya Shavit’s Shari’a and Muslim Minorities: The Wasati and Salafi Approaches to Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt al-Muslima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Said Fares Hassan’s Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt: History, Development, and Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 114 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:1 Zahalka credits Shavit with giving him useful comments while preparing Shari’ah in the Modern Era. It is no coincidence that all of these books are from a Sunni perspective with particular focus on the works of two well-known scholars in the Sunni legal world: Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Taha Jabir al-Alwani (d. 2016). Zahalka’s book, therefore, captures the gradual creation of another – or perhaps a new – branch of fiqh that focuses on the socio-legal issues faced by Muslims ruled by non-Muslim sovereigns or systems that conflict with Islamic law. His objective is to examine the “fiqh al-aqalliyyāt of the wasaṭi faction, a school of thought dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood that positions itself in the middle ground between conservative resistance to changing religious laws and the disintegration of the commitment to religious tradition” (p. 4). The author ...